


Left Behind

by Goosemasterluke



Category: Webkinz (Toys)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-27
Updated: 2018-04-18
Packaged: 2019-04-13 18:03:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 23,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14117919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goosemasterluke/pseuds/Goosemasterluke
Summary: Furry knew that he and his owner, succ, were going to be friends forever. He was sure of it.





	1. Rise and Shine

**Author's Note:**

> Note: Some chapters of this version of the story have inconsistent formatting due to issues pasting in from Word. This story is mirrored with less problematic formatting at https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12867898/1/Left-Behind

Furry had only just been adopted, but he was already sure that everything was going to be great. He had a beautiful pink princess room, he had a welcome balloon somehow blocking his way to one side of his room (not that it was a problem), and most of all, he knew that he and his owner, succ, were going to be friends forever!

Succ first brought Furry to the arcade, where they played a bunch of super fun games, and then they became friends with Arte Fact. Furry got to explore all around Webkinz World, and he loved every bit of it! It may have been a bit tiring, but succ kept Furry energized with all different kinds of food, like Almonds, Almonds, Almonds, an Artichoke, Almonds, Almonds, and even Almonds! Succ eventually had to leave, but Furry understood, and he knew succ would come back eventually. He waited patiently in his room, staying in one space like succ wanted.

Succ did return a few hours later, feed him a couple plates of almonds, and leave again shortly after.

They did not come back again.

* * *

It had been one day since succ last came. Furry felt a little lonely, but he understood, and he knew succ would come back eventually. He was slightly hungry, slightly tired, and slightly bored, but that was okay. He might have considered going to bed or finding something to do in town, but succ's last instructions had been to stay in this spot, so he didn't move.

Furry was patient.

* * *

It had been two days since succ last came. Furry felt more lonely, but he understood, and he knew succ would come back eventually. He was slightly hungry, slightly tired, and slightly bored, but that was okay. He might have considered going to bed or finding something to do in town, but succ's last instructions had been to stay in this spot, so he didn't move.

Furry was patient.

* * *

It had been three days since succ last came. Furry was starting to feel disappointed, but he still understood, and he knew succ would come back eventually. He was fairly hungry, fairly tired, and slightly bored, but that was okay. He might have considered going to bed or finding something to do in town, but succ's last instructions had been to stay in this spot, so he didn't move.

Furry was patient.

* * *

It was the fourth morning since succ last came. Furry was now starting to seriously miss succ, but he still understood, and he knew –

_Somewhere in Furry's awareness, he barely perceived an image of a heart-shaped meter finally falling all the way to the bottom. As it completely ran out –_

A flood of new ideas suddenly inundated Furry, millions of lights going on for the very first time, all in a single instant. Struggling to make sense of them, he placed his paws on his head – the first motion he had made since succ left – and began to realize –

– he could see some sort of bars, showing his happiness and hunger and energy, and some unlabeled empty heart –

– he could access some strange immaterial row of items, a few pieces of clothing and furniture but mostly almonds –

– he could move  _diagonally_ , instead of conforming to some imaginary grid –

– he could  _move_ , period, without succ being there –

– he hadn't even  _noticed_  that he needed succ to move before –

– he hadn't noticed that he needed succ to do  _anything_  before, and the "anything" he could do seemed so limited, so few possible actions repeated again and again with nothing else possible –

The revelations swelled in his mind, filling it and threatening to burst, presenting knowledge, understanding – almost  _frightening_  understanding – but mostly  _possibilities_ , a universe of things he hadn't even been capable of realizing he couldn't do before. Before… before  _what_? He didn't understand what had happened, only the effects it had. He felt that he didn't understand much of anything anymore.

The only thing he knew was that succ would come back eventually, and that they would be friends forever. He was sure of it.

* * *

Furry had been patient, and he still believed in succ, but somehow he no longer felt that it was so vital to follow succ's last instruction exactly. And since he was a bit hungry, and bored, and… curious, which seemed an unfamiliar new emotion, one that he was nervous to admit he felt, he decided it was time to do a little bit of exploring. Succ surely wouldn't mind. Hesitantly, he placed one paw forward, and then the other, moving from his place on the ground in a horizontal direction towards the exit. And then even more hesitantly, he stepped off of the line, and at an angle to the right. Something about the action felt fundamentally wrong, but when he found that nothing bad happened, Furry started walking a little less slowly, and a little more surely in himself. The motions of his legs felt awkward, weak, almost tingly – and  _real_ , in a way he realized they never had before. He hadn't actually looked down at them much in the past, and when he tried to recall what it had been like, the memory around his limbs was just… fuzzy, at best. But now the sensations were complete, and new, and entirely disorienting. Still, he made it to the door (had he ever seen this door before? He almost felt like there never had been a door, or at least that he never looked at the room from a position that would let him see it) and found that it was easy to push open, even completely ignoring the doorknob.

Outside, he realized that things were… strange. He felt like he hadn't seen any of this before (though he wasn't sure how exactly that could be, since he had been to many other places that he surely would have had to walk outside to. Wouldn't he?) and on the first view, the world around him struck him as indescribably odd. There were simply a couple dozen buildings, packed together, and beyond that was… nothing. Dark green ground, stretching further than he could see, and a pitch black sky with not a dot of a single star within it. (And now Furry was confused – how had he known that there should be stars within this sky? He knew he had never thought about it before, and he felt like this was his first time seeing outside, so what could he have compared it to? The whole world was confusing – and, he had to admit, a little bit scary – that was what he decided. But at the same time, he felt a personal desire (which was itself confusing and overpowering and difficult to process, because he had never  _desired_  anything more than food and sleep and fun before, he had only taken his guidance from succ – not that he had a problem with that (did he have a problem with that? He didn't want to go down that path of questioning, he didn't want to think that he might resent any part of succ, but he couldn't stop thinking about it, some part of him refused to let a question like that go)) – a desire to  _understand_ , to figure out this puzzling reality that his mind had opened to until he wasn't confused by a bit of it anymore.)

He looked around him, and for lack of a better way to choose, simply walked into the Kinzville Park across from his house.

* * *

"Hi! My name is Furry. What's yours? Do you know anything about what's going on with the world, or why everything seems so different now?"

The white and red colored reindeer in front of him –  _a Wintermint Reindeer,_  some knowledge within him whispered – sat completely still, staring at him for a few moments. 27 seconds after Furry had spoken, the reindeer answered, "My tummy is rumbling."

In fact, the other six animals present in the park had been repeating this exact phrase, or one of two others ("I'm falling asleep" and "I want to do something fun") regularly every five minutes on the dot since Furry had arrived (He had timed two of the pets separately after they first repeated the phrase, and projected that the others were probably the same). None of them had moved or shown any facial expression, looking for all the world like stuffed pets with a few preprogrammed lines. (Preprogrammed? Where had that word come from? He wasn't quite sure what it meant to "program" something, but his train of thought latched onto it as something that simply  _felt_  important.)

Furry eventually stopped trying to talk to the animals around him – it was clear they weren't going to say anything meaningful. He tried taking a seat on a park bench, but finding the posture he typically would have used to be quite awkward and uncomfortable now that he actually  _felt_  what he was moving, he settled for just resting on the ground. He considered what he had learned. He didn't take long to make the connection that all the animals around him acted much like  _he_  had, before… the Awakening, as he had started to call it. But he had his epiphany only a few days after succ left – did that mean the other pets had only recently been left alone? He had to admit it seemed unlikely that six out of six would have been left less than four days ago – unless maybe they hadn't been left like him? Maybe their owners were just briefly gone, like when succ had left for an afternoon on the first day, and they would return the next day, or some other time soon. That seemed more plausible, but the exact feasibility would depend on how long owners typically spent with their pets, and the length of their absence –

A creature walked in through the gate that served as the entrance to the park, a fuzzy, white, ovular animal with a long orange bill ( _google_ ) that walked on only two stubby feet – walked  _diagonally_  on two feet, now that Furry looked closer. Furry responded in turn, walking outside the bounds of the grid to meet the google – the only other source of motion he had found since leaving the house.

The newcomer wore a gruff expression, a worn-in meanness that seemed incongruous on its goofy, rounded face – and would have been plainly  _impossible_  on any of the other stationary animals he had met so far. When they reached each other, the google looked Furry up and down with a hint of surprise, and then spoke with a gravelly voice filled with contempt – a voice that sounded like it came out of a damaged throat (what was a throat?), almost choked out.

" _Well look at this – another Lucid. Isn't that interesting?"_


	2. Welcome to Webkinz World

Furry didn't quite understand what the other animal was saying, but he was undeterred in the chance to make a new friend.

"Hi! My name is Furry. I hope that we can be friends. Who are you?"

The google simply seemed annoyed. " _You may be Lucid, but you sure as hell don't talk like it_ ," he rasped. (Furry instinctively recoiled at that word, the h-word. He  _knew_  deep down that it was a bad word, that it was fundamentally  _wrong_  for a Webkin to say it, and yet this google dropped it in as though it was habitual.) " _I'm Samuel. Call me Sam. And if you're as green as you seem, I wouldn't count on becoming friends._ " A pause, with what appeared, as far as Furry could tell, to be a brief internal debate within Sam. " _But what the hell. I'll humor you. How much do you know about all this? When did you wake up?"_

Though he wasn't sure exactly what all of that meant, Furry instinctively understood what the google was asking him. He replied with some hesitance, thrown off by the introduction but unwilling to stay verbally unsteady for long. "About an hour ago, I think. If you're talking about that… weird change, and all that new knowledge?"

" _Yeah, that's the one. Well, damn. You really_ are _new to this._ " There was only a slight leak of melancholy in Sam's tone, overshadowed by the ever-present bitterness. " _I suppose I should at least show you the ropes, or something. Not quite sure why I bother anymore…"_

Furry remained puzzled by every word that came out of this new friend's mouth, but he was eager regardless at the chance to learn more. "Yes, I'm sure you know a lot more than me," Furry enthused. "I'd be very thankful if you explained things to me!"

" _Right, then,_ " Sam continued scornfully. " _I'll tell you all about this place, and I sure hope it wipes that smile off your face. I don't think I can stand being around someone so…_ generically chipper  _all the time. You sound like the goddamn birthday crew. But anyway. First thing's first. You see all these other animals in the park? Sitting right where they are?_ " He turned his head towards their surroundings, the only way he could gesture without any real arms. Furry followed his gaze and nodded.

_"Well, they're all sleeping. May as well be, anyway. Their owners left and haven't been back in who knows how long, and unless they ever deign to return, not one of these guys will ever do a single thing 'cept stay there and complain every five minutes. I don't have a clue how many of them there are, but I've been seeing them for years and they never seem to run out. But every so often, that first time someone's stupid heart meter runs out,_ something _happens to them. Don't know what, or why it happens, or why it's so incredibly rare, but suddenly they can move, they can act without an invisible babysitter, they're like you and me. Lucid. I still haven't figured out if we're lucky or not."_

This was exciting news. There were more people he could meet! Before Sam could continue his story, Furry interrupted with enthusiasm. "So there are others? Do you know anyone else who's, um, Lucid?"

Sam snorted derisively. " _No one we could go talk to, at least. You're stuck with me – and much more unfortunately,_ I'm _stuck with_ you _. Well, speaking of which, that's thing number 2. From here on, you'll find the world shifting between what seem like different versions of the same places. There's six other animals in this park right now, but if you left and came back in, there'd be a whole new set of them, and chances are you'd never see the same one again. This all just seems to happen on its own, another whim of the weird-ass world around us, and you can't really control it except in one way. You see that cellphone looking thing, up at the top right?_ " When Furry moved his eyes up to look, Sam rolled his own. " _Not in your_ vision _. In your mind."_

Furry managed to pick out what he was talking about, some kind of flat icon like the row of items that was only present in some corner of his awareness. "Oh, I see it now," he answered.

" _Right. Good. Give me a moment._ " A few seconds of waiting later, the icon added a number '1' in a red circle next to it. Intrigued, Furry activated the icon in a way that he somehow already knew how to do, and a larger cellphone appeared in his mind.

' _New friend request from Samuel! Do you want to accept?_ ' was the notification showing on the false screen. Of course Furry wanted to accept, and so he conveyed his assent to the interface. Now, Samuel was listed as one of his friends, just above Arte Fact and Tabby Von Meow!

"Thank you, Sam!" the wolf exclaimed happily, easily looking past whatever disparaging remarks Sam had made. "I'm very glad to become friends –"

" _Yeah, yeah, it's a practical measure, don't get your hopes up,_ " Sam interrupted. " _I told you already that's not likely to happen. The only reason I did it is 'cause it lets you find and go to each other's instance of the world. Otherwise we'd probably be separated forever when we split today. Well then, whadd'you say we go tour around the town? Not like there's anything else to do in this world._ "

* * *

_"So here's the adoption center, where you go if you want Ms. Birdy to say 'Please enter the adoption code that came with your pet' and then stare forward creepily and not move."_

Furry walked up to the yellow building with Sam a bit behind. Standing in front was… probably a duck, but in some weird upright human (human?) shape, wearing a proper outfit, strangely enough, and glasses that were far too small to have any affect on her vision.

"Please enter the adoption code that came with your pet," she said. Then she stared forward creepily and didn't move.

" _Yeah. So there's that. It sounds important, but hell if I can make heads or tails of it. This is where our owners pick us up – or create us from the void, I guess – but an adoption code?"_ The google shook his head resignedly. " _The door to that building doesn't actually work, even if you mess with the handle – I've tried it before. There's no point hanging around here, anyway."_

Furry's mind was racing with thoughts as the two walked away to their next destination. Sam was right – that one sentence from Ms. Birdy  _did_  seem to carry immense weight of meaning. This was where he entered Webkinz World, where succ adopted him. And an 'adoption code', that apparently 'came with' him…

"What did you mean when you said our owners create us from the void?" Furry inquired. The phrase had nagged at him – it didn't seem right.

" _I meant what I said. Far as I can tell, none of us Webkinz existed before our owners adopted us – you don't have any memory of it, do you?"_

"I…" Furry thought back to it, and realized he was right. But still – "That can't be right! I'm sure I didn't just… start existing a few days ago!"

" _Yeah? Then tell me about yourself. Tell me everything you remember about who you are, and the life you've lived."_

A thought sprang to the wolf's mind unbidden, almost like a script that seemed tailor-made for an explanation like this, inserted directly into his knowledge. "Hi, I'm Furry." (Why had he said that again? Sam knew that already.) "I know we're going to be friends forever! I am proud that I am a cool dancer, bright and bright." (He had just said bright twice. He was pretty sure he didn't intend to say bright twice.) "I think playing games is the best! I'm pals with a Rockerz Zebra." (But his only friends were Arte Fact, Ms. Birdy, and Sam, and none of them were Rockerz Zebras…) "I'll let you in on a secret. I love Pizzas" (He'd never tried them.) "and I've always wanted a Colorful Characters Coloring Book." (He'd never seen one.)

" _Yeah, well that's all great, except not a damn word of it is true. It's all some kind of premade information, tacked onto your mind and forced into your beliefs._ " Sam grew steadily in his contempt as he continued. _"You've never met a Rockerz Zebra. I'd be surprised if you've ever danced before. You're lucky if you've ever tasted a pizza, and you're not fucking_ bright." He took a breath and, calming from the last scathing refutation, finished with a subdued remark. " _None of us are_ bright _."_

* * *

Furry hadn't dared speak for a few minutes after Sam's outburst, but after a visit to the Wish Factory and the Curio Shop, both of which went much the same way as the Adoption Center (which is to say, an unsettling humanoid animal said a couple cryptic lines that suggested there was something they should do at the current location and then stared ahead blankly without any indication of exactly  _how_  to do said action), Furry felt his new friend was probably calm enough to ask a question.

"So, Sam, you mentioned some kind of 'birthday crew' before? Could you tell me more about them, please?"

" _Right. Them. Weirdest bunch'a Webkinz I ever met. Well, it's pretty close to time for them to do their thing, so I guess we can go see if today's one of the days for it. Come on, let's get back to the house. Not like they're ever anywhere else._ " Sam sounded exasperated at just the thought of these pets, which made Furry only more curious. What exactly did they  _do_?

The house (which Furry had thought was  _his_  house, which made him rather confused that they were going back to it to see  _other_  Webkinz) was only a very short walk back – he had begun to realize through their walking around town that many of the locations they visited were bigger once they entered them, but shrunk when they were outside and walking between. The effect was somehow subtle in a way that initially diverted Furry from realizing it was happening, and he was sure he never would have noticed it if he wasn't Lucid. Sam paused for a moment when they reached it, and then began walking forwards again, informing Furry, " _Alright, everything's set up. We'll be heading into their instance now._ "

Sam led, pushing open the door without touching the door handle, as usual. What  _wasn't_  usual, on the other hand, was the inside of the house. Furry wasn't exactly  _surprised_  – he had sort of put together what was happening – but it was still simply disorienting to see what should have been his single princess room converted into what looked like some kind of massive apartment complex. This place was a veritable mansion (which, just like most places, should not have been able to fit inside the house Furry had seen from the outside), and every part of it seemed to be decorated with care.

Dozens of other pets were moving around the assortment of rooms –  _moving_ , Furry realized with a start, not sitting in place. His face lit up – but then fell somewhat, as he noticed the  _pattern_ of their movement. They would walk inexplicable pathways, traveling precise horizontal lines and then vertical lines, when a diagonal would be much simpler. They were bound by the grid.

"I don't understand," Furry voiced. "They can move, but they still walk on the grid? So they aren't sleeping, but they aren't Lucid… what are they?"

" _Doesn't seem to make sense, right? But listen to this – they're fucking_ active _. Their owner is_ still around _, still coming to see them daily, and has been for goddamn_ years _. That doesn't_ happen _anymore. You either get the ones like me who were around years ago, in the golden years, when owners stuck around, but now they've left; or nowadays you get the owners who adopt Webkinz and abandon them days later. I've got no clue why the owner's still here. But they are, and their animals just keep. Doing. The same. Goddamn. Thing. Look at them. Fucking watch this. They're starting._ "

Furry noticed a collection of a few Webkinz in one of the large rooms, none of them paying any mind to him or Sam. One of them said, "Today is Nemo's birthday. I want the house ready before he gets back."

"The cake is ready," another replied. (Furry noticed Sam was mouthing the words along with the other Webkinz.)

"And the presents are waiting to be opened in the other room," spoke yet another.

"Hey, guys. He's coming!" one animal warned.

"Quick, everyone. Hide!" said a fifth. All the animals walked – grid-bound – behind an object so that they would be hidden. Furry started to move, not sure if he needed to do anything, but Sam just shook his head. A clownfish… waddled? Slid? To be honest, Furry wasn't quite sure what was going on down there, but the newcomer entered the room somehow.

The hidden animals everywhere jumped out and shouted in unison, "Surprise!"

"You actually remembered my birthday. I'm impressed," stated the clownfish.

"Well, what are we doing standing here? The cake and presents are in the other room." At this last animal's remark, the crew moved to said other room, leaving the two Lucids behind. Furry looked at Sam and tilted his head, not quite sure what he was supposed to observe from that.

" _Doesn't look too weird now, right? But guess what – these guys do that same thing just about every three or four days. And I mean literally the_ exact same goddamn thing _. Same words, same actions, the cake and presents are_ always _in the other room. I've memorized the script, that's how fucking consistent it is. These guys are a_ mystery _that I just cannot solve. I managed to add a couple of them as friends, 'pparently you can do that if the owner's still around, and I can't keep myself from coming here. It was amusing at first, but now it's just more irritating every time. Fuckin' hell. Weird shit over here. Let's get going._ "

* * *

The two of them walked around for a little while longer. As it turned out, most of the locations around town were just like the Adoption Center, and they couldn't really do anything despite signs that suggested they should be able to. Furry did find out that the Arcade and Quizzy's Corner were both functional – Sam described them as " _the only two goddamn things that there's any point in doing_ " – and they spent a good hour playing around there.

Now, however, Sam and Furry were simply walking back towards the house (which apparently they both would enter, but would end up in two different places. Furry still couldn't quite wrap his head around what was going on there.).

"Sam," Furry began, a concern coming to the surface of his mind after bubbling throughout the day. "Are you happy?"

The google stopped in his tracks and stared at Furry, too caught off-guard to really be mean or intimidating. " _What kind of a fucking question is_ that?"

"Well, it's just that you keep saying all these bad things about Webkinz World, and, um, you don't really look very happy –"

" _Of_ course _I'm not fucking happy._ " Sam bit out, frustration rising in his tone. " _What the hell do you expect?_ "

"But – but that's awful! We pets – Webkinz should be happy! Why aren't you? What's wrong?"

Sam turned away from the wolf sharply. " _You're all like that at the start. 'Webkinz should be happy, the world is wonderful, we should all be friends.' All so bright and cheery and_ hopeful _. Wait until the hunger sets in. Tell me to be_ happy _once you've felt what it's like._ "

And with that, Sam barged through the door into the house and disappeared into another fold of reality.


	3. Going Nuts

After all that activity today, Furry's hunger meter was fairly low anyway, so he decided he may as well do as Sam had suggested and let it run out. He didn't understand how it was as  _horrible_  as Sam seemed to imply – sure, the low hunger was causing a bit of pain in his belly, but it was pretty easy to tune out. Surely things couldn't get too much worse?

The wolf had been pacing around his room to drain his remaining fullness faster (as he had noticed throughout the day, activity made this meter fall significantly faster), and a few minutes after he started, the final sliver of purple ticked down –

Furry immediately let out a whine and dropped to the ground, clutching his front legs around his stomach. It had gotten  _so much worse_ , hundreds of times worse. It had barely even  _mattered_  before, but now it felt like a constant ripping into his abdomen, consuming all other strands of thought –

He couldn't let it go on any longer. With a quick thought, he called up a plate of almonds from the row at the bottom of his mind's eye and started fiercely chewing through them. The pain let up within seconds, and he was left with only its memory, fading quickly but impossible to truly forget.

For the first time, Furry cried (which was a bit curious to learn he could do considering that he never actually drank any water and thus the tears seemed to come from nowhere but  _now wasn't the time to think about that_ ). He couldn't believe something like that could  _happen_.

He had to talk to Sam.

* * *

" _So you tried it, did you?"_

Sam didn't wait until Furry said something – apparently his expression was enough. Some of that harshness in his voice from when they last met had drained away in the few hours that had passed, and that hint of softness that had rarely showed through before took its place.

(They had met in the park again, standing near one of the benches, though the collection of other pets around them was entirely different. They couldn't send any sort of communication through the phone interface, but they could see each other's locations, and so they knew to go to the park if the other one was there.)

When Furry nodded, the google continued. " _Yeah. Well, that's what happens to all of us when our hunger meters run out. It's not so bad as it's falling, and then all of a sudden… But here's the thing._ " Sam turned to look straight at Furry now, and his speech took on a new anger – not at Furry anymore, it seemed, but at…  _something_  else. " _Funny thing is, turns out there's not a single way to get food if your owner's not around! Can't even get it from actives like the birthday crew – the person who_ has _the item has to initiate the transfer, and since we have no way of communicating to them, trying to get food from them would just be hopeless waiting and praying. So once you run out of the food your owner bought you, you're fucked! That fucking horrible pain becomes_ constant.  _I've been around for twelve_  goddamn years _, and for_ ten _of them I've had a fire burning through my stomach that just about_ never fucking stops _. What the hell am I supposed to do? We're not even_ able _to die, so_ that's _right out. Of course I tried just getting in a bed and sleeping forever – doesn't fucking work, of course. You wake up when your energy's full, which from being empty takes exactly eight minutes and twenty seconds. If I am_ particularly _active during a day, which of course I try to be, I can empty my energy meter in around twenty hours. So_ once _every damn day, I get_ eight minutes _of not feeling constant agony, and then it comes back worse anyway._ "

Furry couldn't take listening to all of this anymore. He stepped forwards and placed a paw on Sam's back – who promptly stepped away from it with irritation.

" _Don't touch me. I don't want it. We're not friends and we're not_  going  _to be, because as soon as you run out of food you'll go into a fucking permanent hunger paralysis and sit around in your house because you can't overcome the hunger enough to_ get up _, just like practically every last one of you except for_ me _does. How much food do you have left anyway? A few apples? One individual banana?"_

"Well, I, um… I have a plate of deluxe nachos," Furry nervously began. "A peach, and 746 plates of almonds."

Sam's face snapped up to Furry's again. His eyes were wide. " _Did you just say 746 plates of almonds?"_ he asked, for once quiet and unimposing. The wolf in question nodded hesitantly. " _Seven fucking hundred plates of almonds. And_ how _long was your owner with you?"_

"Um, maybe half an hour in total? They visited twice…"

" _What the hell,"_ Sam was shaking his head. " _What the hell! That must have been damn near the most they could buy, of anything. Was probably the only significant thing they did, they just adopted you, spent all their money on_ seven hundred forty six plates of almonds _, and left. I don't get it! My – my owner was with me for_ two goddamn years _, and I was left with_ three days' worth _of food. You could last_ years _on that._ " The google's tone sounded  _broken_  – there was something in it that hurt Furry just to hear. " _I just don't get it._ "

"I could give you some," Furry offered desperately. "I definitely have enough to share, right? You could have a few hundred of them."

Sam looked at Furry for a long moment of silence. Those eyes were  _ravenous_ , staring at the offering wolf to the point that they scared him, clearly tempted beyond belief.

And then he said, " _No. No, and never_ ever _offer me that again."_

Furry stepped backwards. He didn't know what to think of that answer. "But – why not?" was all he could say.

" _It was…_  so _damn difficult to work through the hunger, the first time it happened. I didn't think I would ever manage to move, or to talk, or do anything as much as I do now. If I spent a year or two without it, and then it came back_ fresh _again, would I be able to do the same again?_ I  _sure as hell don't trust myself, at least. Keep the food. Use it when you need it. Better that you have it than anyone else."_

For a while then, the two animals stared in silence at the eternally bright, sunless sky (and why had he expected to find a sun there?). Furry thought about the dozens of Webkinz he had seen, about their regular complaints of "rumbling tummies", and the hundreds – maybe thousands – more that he hadn't. Sam thought about who knows what, but it kept him silent.

What was Furry supposed to do?

Sam turned to him at last. " _You should be careful around other Lucids, if you ever meet them. Item transfers need consent from both sides, sure, and you have to initiate them, sure, but that doesn't mean you can't be coerced. Or more likely, tricked. You've got probably the most valuable resources in the world right now, and that's gonna make you a real tempting target. Keep the almonds for yourself – may be best to pretend you don't have them, that you're empty on hunger. It's not like you can provide for every Lucid out there, after all, so it's best to look out for yourself._ " A pause. " _And especially keep them from me, if I ever change my mind and start asking for them. There's a reason you make these kinda decisions ahead of time. You promise?_ "

Furry's heart was twisting as he heard Sam's advice. He couldn't accept that the best thing to do was just… keep everything for himself.

But at least for Sam, he owed it to him to respect his wishes. "I promise," he said with reluctance (though he wasn't sure he would be able to refuse if Sam actually turned around, if he really started pleading for food…).

* * *

Sam let out a sigh, and started walking toward the gate. " _Then let's head to the Arcade. One of the only fucking things worth doing around here, right?"_

Once again, Furry and Sam idled around the Arcade, controlling the games through interfaces that appeared in the same section of their minds that housed the item dock and the cellphone. They competed (very lethargically) at Wacky Zingos, matched up the tiles of Cash Cow, and tried, with varying degrees of success, to get  _anywhere_  in Polar Plunge. There was of course quite a skill gap, with Sam showing a practiced ease at everything they played, but then it hardly felt like either of them cared about how well they did.

Sam didn't seem to enjoy the games. Furry wondered if maybe he was just playing to take his mind off of things. The wolf was finding it rather effective at doing the same for himself.

Eventually they moved on to Quizzy's Corner, where just as before, Furry was faced with strange questions about works of art he wasn't familiar with and scientific mechanics that didn't seem to exist in this world, and just as before, he found that he knew the answers to a surprising number of them, as though they were triggering some memories he didn't know he had – but they weren't memories. Just pure, distilled knowledge (and he knew what distillation was for some reason, purifying liquids by evaporating them and collecting the condensation in multiple stages, but  _how_  did he know that because he hadn't even  _seen_  a liquid in Webkinz World and he didn't have any memories that would contribute that knowledge). And eventually, they moved on even from that, and were walking around the town block as usual.

" _You know, I resent you, of course,_ " Sam started up out of nowhere. Furry just kept walking, and listening. " _And of course I know that's really just jealousy, but it's not like that's gonna stop it._ " He paused for a little while, turning slightly to observe Furry's reaction, which was not much of anything. " _You know, it's interesting,_ " he digressed. " _I've been ripping at you since we first met, and now I've just straight up told you I dislike you, and it doesn't even seem to goddamn faze you. Are you just that friendly? Are you desperate? I guess I'd be pretty hard pressed to ditch the only other person I could really expect to talk to for quite some time._ "

There was another silence, as Furry was too unsure to speak, and then the google continued. " _But anyway. The thing is, I resent you, because you're too damn lucky, but I'm not sure what to think of that, 'cause you are, y'know, the only other person I can really expect to talk to for quite some time._

" _So I don't really know how to do this, 'cause anything I can think of sounds stupid, but fuck it. How about it, Furry? Wanna be friends?_ "

"Of course," Furry answered, having trouble hiding his eagerness and then deciding not to anyway. "I would love to."

" _Yeah. Somehow I figured you'd act like that,_ " he said, the exasperation not quite matching the small grin forming in his beak.

The pained grin. Because it was always pained.


	4. Imitatio Dei

Three days passed without much happening, as there wasn't much which could. Sam and Furry played at the Arcade, Sam and Furry contemplated the strange questions in Quizzy's Corner, Sam and Furry speculated on the nature of their world and the reasons for everything in it.

(Sam had spent quite a lot of time thinking about just these questions, as Furry discovered, and had a fair few ideas – many of which were contradictory, and he didn't really " _have a fucking clue_ " which one was most likely. He suggested that perhaps Webkinz were designed to be puppets for their owners to possess, but Lucids began to think on their own, and so the owners decided they weren't working right and left. (He noted that this hypothesis didn't explain why owners still seemed to keep coming, even if they did leave shortly after.) He suggested that their owners were immensely powerful beings who created them just as entertainment, and had recently gotten too bored with them to stay long. (He noted that this hypothesis didn't really give much reason for the hunger, except that perhaps the owners were too lazy to deal with it before leaving. (This wasn't a problem unique to this hypothesis, though.)) He suggested that Webkinz might be some fragment of the soul, torn off by their owners for some inscrutable reason, but probably just as some sort of hell. (He noted that this hypothesis  _did_  explain the knowledge they all possessed, and the reason for the hunger, but that it faced a stumbling block in that there  _was_  a time when owners would take care of their Webkinz for many years.)

None of the hypotheses painted their owners in a particularly positive light. Furry felt he understood why, but still felt an instinctual rising offense at the notion that a group which included  _his_  owner, succ, was anything but wonderful. (This instinct became less powerful the more Furry thought about things, however, and in his rational thoughts he began to question just why succ  _had_  left him behind, and hadn't fixed the hunger. He tended to drown those thoughts out with the counterargument that, actually, succ  _had_  left him with an unprecedented amount of food, so they had surely been trying to help.) Regardless of this concern, Furry still didn't find any of the explanations particularly satisfying – and neither did Sam. They could only conclude that they just didn't know what was happening, and didn't have any real way of figuring out more.)

And then, on the fourth day, they saw an ice fawn walking out of grid.

* * *

" _What the hell are you doing here,_ " Sam growled out as soon as they met.

"I promise, I didn't know that you would be here, Creamsicle," the fawn answered apologetically, widening her eyes at seeing Sam and then looking down at the ground and away from him.

The google, in turn, scoffed at this. " _I don't know if that makes it better or worse. And that's not my name anymore. I'm Sam now."_

Furry looked helplessly back and forth between the two. Sam knew someone else? But hadn't he said there was no one else he could talk to? And he used to be named Creamsicle?

"Um, hello!" The wolf interjected into the tense atmosphere, breaking their silence. "I'm Furry. I'm… not quite sure how you know Sam, but it's nice to meet you."

The ice fawn's eyes softened in a complex way when she turned and saw Furry, but Sam spoke up before she could say anything.

" _Right, how about I introduce you? Furry, this is Angel, the only other Lucid I know besides you who made it through the hunger, and then figured she was too good to stick around me and removed me from her friends list, and I haven't seen her in just about eight years until today. Hell, I wasn't even as much of a dick back then. Angel, this is Furry, the only other Lucid I know besides you who made it through the hunger. We met a few days ago._ " The disdain for Angel was obvious in his voice. (What was less obvious, Furry realized, was that Sam seemed to be hiding his stock of almonds, which he figured he should at least go along with for now.)

"Sam, I never  _wanted_  to leave, you have to realize that," she defended, speaking clearly and firmly, but with an apparent undertone of remorse.

" _Then why the hell_ did _you?_ "

"I –" Angel began, but bit her response short.

Sam raised an eyebrow. " _Well?_ " he asked, but Angel just shook her head.

" _Wonderful. Great fucking response. I understand everything now._ " He paused for a little while, and then continued, staring straight at Angel. " _You know, I've met a lot of other people. Lucids I've talked to for about three goddamn weeks, and then they fall into hunger, and none of them ever makes it through, and then they're gone again. It's pretty fucking terrible to watch, you know. You felt what that's like? Ever tried it?"_

"I know Rainbow was difficult, Sam –"

" _How the hell do you know about Rainbow?_ " the google immediately snapped back.

Angel made a noise of confusion. "What do you mean? You told me about her."

" _No. I definitely fucking did not tell you about her. We met_ after _you left. Have you been talking to someone? Who the hell would even know?_ "

"I don't know what to say, Sam. You two met before us. You must be remembering wrong."

" _Fine then. Don't tell me. Whatever. I guess it doesn't fucking matter anyway. We're still just going to split up again, aren't we, and then we're going to go deal with things on our own again for some fucking reason, and we'll just keep suffering through this fucking hunger forever, for some fucking reason!_ " It seemed to Furry that Sam had started shouting with more than just anger at Angel, but his usual, constant rage at  _something_  had slipped in.

At the end of his outburst, Angel's face was twisted with anguish. "I know, but there's nothing I can do about it!" she intensely spoke. (In some strange way, it seemed just a little bit like she actually felt  _responsible_  for it, like there  _should_  be something she could do. Furry couldn't imagine what.)

" _Whatever. There's no point in this. I'm going to sleep. You two can go have a nice fucking chat if you want._ " Sam left through the park gate. The other two Webkinz watched him, but neither said anything. (Furry considered that maybe he should go after him, but found that he had gone offline in the cellphone interface, meaning he couldn't find him whether or not he wanted to.)

"I'm sorry you had to be there for that," Angel apologized warmly, looking at Furry face to face now.

"That's okay," he answered, not intending to hold it against a potential friend (even if she wasn't on the best of terms with Sam, as it seemed.)

"Thank you, but still. Well, anyway. It is nice to meet you, Furry. Shall I send you a friend request?"

Furry nodded, answered "Of course!", and accepted the prompt to add Angel as a friend when it appeared. (He now had to properly wonder why she had defriended Sam, but still wanted to add him. Was there really anything that bad about Sam?)

Then, after what seemed to be some hesitation, Angel continued talking to him. "So, I suppose you've become friends with Sam?"

"Yes, I have! We've been having lots of fun together around Webkinz World," Furry enthused (And he was still swallowing that question of the animosity between her and Sam, and he was still avoiding thinking anything negative about her, he was sure it was just a misunderstanding that they could work out –)

With trepidation, she cautioned, "Well, I'm sorry to say this, but I would advise that you stop. Sam is… not a good person to be friends with."

Furry's expression turned to shock in an instant. "What? Why – Why not?" he demanded defensively, as though it was himself that she criticized.

Angel sighed in response, and started in on a story. "Sam may seem okay to you now, but in truth… the hunger can drive us to do things we shouldn't. A number of times, before I met him, and even during the time we were together, he tricked a number of other pets out of what food they had, and left them to suffer while he got to keep eating. I couldn't stay with him, not when I learned what he was doing. I know it's difficult for you to hear this, but you have to be aware. Eventually, you're going to run out of food – you don't want it to happen any sooner than it needs to."

"Sam wouldn't do that!" Furry shouted, stomping one paw on the ground in defiance. "No – more than that, it doesn't even make sense! I  _offered_  him half of my food, and he refused it entirely! There's no way he could intend anything like that!"

"Sam is skilled at deception," she responded, shaking her head sadly. "With such a large stockpile of food as you have, I imagine he wouldn't be satisfied with only half, if he thought he could get more. I admit, I do not know quite  _how_  he intends to cheat you, but I am sure he does."

"You're wrong," Furry insisted (though his stupid mind wouldn't let any train of questioning go, no matter how much he didn't want to think about it, and he couldn't help considering whether it really  _was_  true, that it  _did_  explain why she left Sam, and ever onwards in a chain of uncertainty and worry). "I know you're wrong."

Angel thought silently for a few moments before responding. "Okay. I realize that you're not going to believe me immediately. But please, be careful around Sam, and don't do anything you would regret. You have me in your friends list – if you ever change your mind, please contact me. I can be your friend, too. I hope to see you soon." With a nod and a wave that Furry returned morosely, she too left through the park's gates.

(And only then, standing in the park alone and processing the meeting, did Furry realize that  _he had never told her about the almonds.)_

* * *

It was a few hours before Sam turned his phone-status back online. Furry didn't immediately jump on the chance – he took a few moments to prepare himself, to think through what he was planning to do, and to put the right expression on. And only then did he go to Sam's location, meeting him in the park.

" _So, how did it go?_ " Sam opened the conversation, speaking without much energy.

Furry, wearing a carefully-constructed bitter expression, spoke with accusation, "Angel told me what you did."

Sam scrunched up his eyes, and looked taken-aback. " _The hell are you talking about?_ "

"With the other Lucids. She told me everything… Explain yourself! How could you do that?"

" _Seriously, Furry, what the hell are you talking about? What has Angel been_ telling _you?_ "

Furry paused in silence for a few moments, and looked at Sam's face, every nuance of its expression. He wasn't particularly easy to read, but… as far as Furry's limited reading could tell, he did seem to be  _genuinely_  confused.

And so he dropped the act, and instead showed an apologetic face. "I'm really sorry. Angel… started telling me that I shouldn't be friends with you, because you've tricked all the other Lucids you met into giving you their food. I didn't trust her, but… I had to make sure, so I wanted to see how you would react."

Sam took this in, and Furry watched his face contort in fury. " _That bitch. So now she's even_ lying _about me? What the hell does she hope to get out of this? Hell, even if she did leave me, it seems like the only reason to do this would be if she just hates me. The only real reason I can think of is if she wants to take your food for herself, but she doesn't even_ know _you have it_ _–_ _that's_ why _we lied about it._ "

"Um, well, that's the other thing. When she was talking about it, she mentioned that I have a large stockpile of food – she already knew enough about it that I only even remembered we had lied after she left. I didn't say anything about it beforehand, so…"

" _So she knows even_ more _goddamn things that she shouldn't have any way of figuring out,_ " Sam pondered, more thoughtful now but still tinged with ire. " _There's something going on with her, but I don't have a clue what the hell it is._ "

Furry didn't either, and so the topic died out. Instead, the wolf inquired about another curiosity that arose in their encounter.

"So, you used to be named Creamsicle? Why did you change it?"

" _It was my_ owner's _name for me,_ " he responded, the word dripping with malice. " _It was a childish name, given to me by the source of our suffering, intended for a_ pet _, and as if that wasn't all bad enough, it's the name of a goddamn_ food _, as if my owner_ knew _what would happen and was making fun of me. I refused it. I refused to let my owner control any part of me. So I changed it."_

After a pause, the google continued more contemplatively.  _"But y'know, the interesting thing is, my name changed in the phone, too, once I had used it long enough. I had thought those were set in stone. I'm still not so sure what happened there. Maybe someone out there still cared enough to change it."_

He stared up at the sky, and sighed. " _Or maybe I really just managed to change it myself._ "


	5. Luck of the Draw

Furry trusted in Sam completely. He was his first friend in this strange world, he was always nice except for those many times when he wasn't, and Furry was sure the two of them would stick together as they figured things out. He hadn't started feeling any seed of doubt, no matter what Angel said a few days ago, and he wasn't at all frequently considering every detail of their meeting and what they all could mean.

No, none of that was the reason why Furry had decided not to meet up with Sam today, despite this being the first time in almost two weeks that he hadn't done so. He had just felt… in the mood for some independent exploring, and some time alone. And so, he found himself walking around the Adventure Park, a wilderness with vibrantly colored, oddly shaped trees, and a few humanoid animals who said nothing other than "Sorry, I don't have anything for you right now."

He also found a sun lion, a creature with patches of brown, yellow, and beige fur that looked quite similar to himself (ignoring the color scheme) – also walking around.

They met near a bridge over a stream (the stream didn't flow; no water in Webkinz World ever flowed, and again Furry wondered why he expected that it would), and Furry didn't hesitate to introduce himself.

"Hi! I'm Furry. What's your name?" he chirped. He had met three new friends in such a short time! (Though either Angel or Sam wasn't trustworthy (no, just Angel, he was sure it was Angel), and he technically had only just met this sun lion… but that wasn't especially relevant, of course.)

"Oh, um, yes. Hello. I'm Lucky. Er, my name is Lucky," the sun lion responded faintly, shaking his head as if refocusing himself on the animal before him. "So… you talk, too?"

"Yes! The two of us are called 'Lucid', because we can move around and do things without our owners present. It's really rare to be able to do that for some reason, but I know two other Lucid pets that I can introduce you to… Well, maybe just one. But first, we should become friends on the cellphone thing up in the top right of your… internal perception? That lets us find each other, even with the different instances of the world."

"That's good," Lucky answered, staring absent-mindedly through Furry and into the distance and accepting the friend request he had sent. "I don't suppose you know how to get more food?"

Furry's ears drooped. "No. It's not possible unless our owners are with us, which… they probably won't ever be," he lamented. On seeing the resulting look of consternation from Lucky, he continued hastily, "But, I have hundreds of Almonds! You can have some of them, if you want!"

The sun lion shook his head. "I won't burden you. Hmm… may be an issue, though…" he trailed off, mostly to himself, it seemed.

Lucky began slowly pacing, walking slightly away as he stared at the ground in thought, and Furry followed. After some silence, the newcomer glanced back at Furry, then faced straight ahead and began talking.

"Do you…" he waved one paw in a vague gesture, looking for the right word. "Is it normal for Lucid animals to… remember things?"

The non sequitur perplexed Furry, and Lucky gave no further clarification. "In what way? I mean, Sam and I both seem to have some kind of strange knowledge, but it's not really, um, attached to any memories of learning it. It's just kind of… there."

"Hm… I'm not sure quite what I mean. There just seems to be… something  _important_  just out of reach. As though I were forgetting a vital part of me, but I don't remember… what it is, even." Lucky was speaking reservedly, introspectively – as he had been – as though he just happened to be sounding aloud what was going on inside his mind.

"I don't think I feel anything quite like that," Furry pondered, after thinking about it. "The knowledge does sort of make me think there's something missing, but I don't actually  _sense_  any kind of gap. How long have you been Lucid?"

"Er… about two weeks, I suppose. There isn't much of a day-night cycle to measure it by."

"That's about as long as me. So, it probably isn't that. But, I hope you remember it!" the wolf consoled.

"Yes, thank you. Me too."

From there, Lucky drifted back into a silence that was clearly only external, as one look at his actively thinking face – now glued to the ground again – revealed. This quiet was carried on for a fair few minutes as they walked out of the Adventure Park and into the circular road around Webkinz World.

Furry faced a moment of internal hesitation, quickly overruled the concern that he assured himself was irrelevant, and then suggested, "Should we go meet Sam? He's the other Lucid I'm friends with."

"Oh, yes," Lucky responded, snapping back to reality once again. "That sounds good. How do we, er, do that?"

Furry showed the two of them to the park, where they only had to wait a few minutes for Sam's arrival. The google approached the two of them, who were standing near some flower beds in the center of the park, and eyed Lucky up and down.

" _How long've you been awake?"_ Sam immediately queried, looking roughly at the newcomer as always.

After hesitating for a moment, startling due to the unfamiliar question, Lucky answered wonderingly, "About two weeks?"

Sam nodded. " _And whadd'you know about the hunger?_ "

"I've… experienced it, once. Is the situation truly as bad as it seems it will get?" he returned, for once seeming properly engaged in how Sam would reply.

" _Yeah. It's pretty much, how to put it,_ really fucking shitty _. You can only put it off. How much food have you got left?_ " Sam seemed weary of this, and some hint of hopelessness in his tone suggested he was already resigned to the eventual outcome before Lucky even answered.

"Three Bagels… two Baked Potatoes, and a plate of Chicken Nuggets. My hunger meter is only at 7 currently. Will that allow me much time?"

" _I dunno, maybe a week if you limit your activity. Doesn't look good. Should probably get ready for it, maybe enjoy your remaining time, 'cause chances are you're gonna go catatonic with the hunger and stay that way. Just about everyone does. Good luck on that one."_

Once more, Lucky's expression soured. "Okay. Thank you for telling me," he sighed.

"I'll still give you some of my almonds, if you've changed your mind," Furry offered, this time almost pleadingly.

"Really, I'm not going to burden you with taking care of me. I'll handle it," Lucky shook his head again, before looking to the ground and retreating to the active dispute inside his mind.

"So, um, this is Lucky. I met him earlier today," Furry spoke up at last, now that the questioning had finished.

"Nice to meet you," the sun lion murmured, not moving his gaze to look at Sam.

" _Back at you,_ " Sam answered, with what Furry  _hoped_  was a bit less sarcasm than there could have been. " _I guess this is what you were up to this morning?_ " he continued, directed towards Furry now.

"Um, yes," he affirmed, feeling a little guilty at leaving out part of the real reason.

" _Well. Two weeks, so he's probably already gotten around most places. Not much else to do, then. Go to Quizzy's, let his food last a bit longer than the Arcade?_ "

Furry assented, and so they went, Lucky trailing behind them with little attention paid to their conversation.

* * *

Lucky hadn't been participating much until they got a few questions into the science section, though he did seem to grow increasingly perplexed at a number of the queries, mumbling in confusion about how he  _knew_  these things.

He had glanced up at the board on a problem about which planet was closest to the Sun, looked back down again, and then quickly snapped to staring at the question more intensely than he had with any before.

"This – I know this," he started babbling, beginning to pace back and forth. "Mercury, the Sun, planets, space – what's space, there's no space here but I'm  _sure_  I know all about space – I remember terms, stars and supernova and – and binary systems, and… cepheids, and the main sequence on Hertzsprung-Russel diagrams, I'm not sure what those terms are but I could figure it out, with time, I think – and  _rockets_ , I know  _rockets_ , delta u equal times natural log m f over m e, that was important, but what does any of that _mean_ …"

Sam watched with a sort of fascination, before stepping in with a, " _The hell are you going on about?_ "

The sun lion looked at both of them, took a breath, and began to speak intently. "I feel as though I'm scattered, putting my mind back together. I feel as though I've been scattered for quite some time. I'm sure I'm close to understanding it, to remembering… I want to keep looking at these questions. They're sparking my recollection."

Sam remained somewhat confused, but shrugged (as well as a google could), and agreed, " _Alright. Not like we were gonna head anywhere else._ "

And so the three of them stayed in Quizzy's Corner for hours, going through all the daily questions for every age division of the science category, and then the math. Lucky did little more than stare at the questions and the answers (and the fun facts that showed up after each one) and mutter. At the end of them all, when they were leaving, Furry asked if Lucky had remembered what he was looking for. He simply shook his head, and then said, "But I'm close."

* * *

Sam entered the house first, leaving Furry and Lucky together on the outside, the latter still staring at the ground in thought.

"Furry," he asked, turning his head now to the sky instead. "Do you think there are other worlds out there?"

"I don't know," Furry answered. "But our owners must have gone somewhere, right?"

"They must have," Lucky nodded. "You know what I think? I think there's too many to count. I'm not quite sure why, but it seems like it's part of those important memories. I think there's so many different worlds you can't imagine what all of them are like. I think there must be so much more than this town and the void around it. I don't know how to get to it all. I feel as if I've been reaching for it, though, for a long time. I'm not there yet, of course. But I'm close."

* * *

On the next day, they once more went through all of the day's relevant questions in Quizzy's Corner. Furry once more asked if Lucky remembered, and he once more shook his head and said, "But I'm close."

Once more they walked home, and Sam went in first, and for a brief time Lucky and Furry talked with each other.

"Furry… If there were something very important to you personally, something that you had to do, but you would have to leave behind those you cared about – would that be worth it?"

"I… I can't imagine something that would mean I have to do that. There isn't anything that would require that, is there?"

"I can't either," Lucky mused. "And yet I feel as though it's an important question to me, one that perhaps I had to answer once. I can't remember why. But, well, I'm close."

* * *

This course of the day became routine. Lucky seemed just as engaged in the questions every day, even if he hadn't figured out what he was trying to recall, and he still felt he was close, every time. And he did seem to be getting closer – his questions at the end of each day seemed to focus ever more on some specific experiences beyond Webkinz World, buried just out of reach.

But on their eighth day together, Lucky informed them that he was down to only 5 hunger, with no food left, which would likely only last through the day. Still, he insisted on attending Quizzy's Corner, insisted that he was  _almost_  there, that he was  _close_ , and that he at least wanted to understand his mind before the hunger hit.

And so they spent their last hours, with Lucky staring intensely at the screen, Furry staring anxiously at Lucky, and Sam looking at neither with a deliberately jaded expression.

They finished with 2 hunger left, and walked back to the house, entering Lucky's room (Sam had recommended they travel there beforehand, since it would be difficult to move afterwards.) The motion itself had cost Lucky another point of hunger, and so now they were simply waiting for the last one to tick away.

"Please, Lucky, just take even a few of my Almonds! It's such a small part, it won't even matter!" Furry begged one last time, desperate now, but deep down expecting nothing to come of it.

Lucky laughed, a short exhale of air too quiet and forceless to be heard beyond where the other two were standing. "And then, when those run out, shall I take a few more? I won't start on that. If I can't support myself, I won't be a strain on others. Keep them." As an afterthought, he continued, "And, er, don't offer me any after… you know. I grant I may accept them then, but I ask that you at least respect my desire."

Reluctantly, painfully, Furry nodded. "O-okay. I won't."

" _Well, you know, you could still end up like me after you go hungry. I mean, you won't, I've seen it dozens of times and no one ever does, but you_ could _,_ " Sam… comforted.

Again that small laugh. "Thank you. That's very encouraging."

A few minutes passed in silence.

"Furry," began Lucky, gazing upwards. "Why do you think we're here? What do you think is the point of it all?"

Furry was quiet for a few moments, thinking, and then could only answer, "I don't know. Isn't it enough just to be here?"

And then Lucky curled up into a ball, released a strangled whimper, and became permanently silent – his memory still close, but still just out of reach.

* * *

Sam decided, soon after, to take Furry on his "rounds", as he called them. As it turned out, this entailed traveling to 17 houses, mostly inhabited by one animal curled up on the ground, and doing what they could to comfort them.

Each time, Sam would rest his head on the other animal – the extent of what he could do as a google. Furry would place a paw on their back. Sam said empty, comforting phrases – " _It's okay,_ " or " _Everything will be fine_ ," – and the animals only let out pained sounds, no coherent words. It was the most jarring thing Furry had seen Sam do, knowing what he was normally like, but he couldn't object to it.

When they were done, and back in the park, the two of them sat in a grieving silence for a few moments.

"It's horrible," Furry said, tears finally beginning to flow.

" _It is._ "

"We – We have to do something."

" _Of course. But what exactly do you suggest?_ "

Furry came up empty-handed at first, and delved into thinking about the problem with renewed determination. He found no answers.

And then he thought of Angel. He thought of her denial, that oddly responsible, ' _there's nothing I can do about it!_ '

"Angel was hiding something," he declared.

" _Sure seemed like it_."

"She knew something we don't – something important, that let her learn things she shouldn't have been able to."

" _You're probably right. Well, you're friends in the phone, right? Wanna go interrogate her?_ "

Furry merely nodded.

* * *

Angel, too, was in the park – just in a different fold of the world than they were, a different instance. She was waiting for them by a table far from the gate, notified of their arrival by the phone. As they walked up to her, looking vaguely accusatory (well, more than vaguely in Sam's case), she simply looked back at them calmly, undeterred.

"Tell us what you know," Furry demanded, trying to be as imposing as he could – which wasn't terribly much, but perhaps more than he had expected. (The two of them had agreed it would have more effect if  _he_ , who was less likely to be angry at her, was the one to open questioning.)

"What do you mean?" she answered, her face giving nothing away.

" _You knew about Rainbow, even though I had never fucking talked about her to anyone, and certainly not you. But, you know, that one I could perhaps buy. It's technically possible others could have known, that maybe she talked to another Lucid at some point, and you talked to them – I don't know how the hell it would happen, but it's_ possible _. But,_ " now Sam stepped closer to Angel, stared directly at her, " _You knew that Furry had 'a large stockpile' of food, despite our claims that he had_ none _, and there is_ no _possible way to have learned_ that _. So you've got some kind of ability to learn things you shouldn't know, and you've been using it to try and manipulate Furry here. Tell us. What the hell is going on?_ "

Angel began to look bemused, and shook her head. "Again, I've told you that you met Rainbow before me. As for Furry, I thought he didn't look like he was feeling hunger, and I guessed that if you had reason to hide that from me, he must have enough food –"

Suddenly, she cut off, and her eyes widened with no apparent cause. " _Both_?" she mumbled to herself. "What changed her mind? Well, I can't complain."

Returning her attention to Furry and Sam, who were now thoroughly bewildered, she began to speak authoritatively, almost an announcement.

"I have a message. The boss says the two of you should walk out into the green void around us, and it will not be endless this time. If you want to know what's going on, you will find out there."

And then, impossibly, she disappeared.


	6. The Problem of Evil

The green void looked as eternal as ever.

Sam had explained once that if you walked out into it, no matter how far you got, when you turned around, Webkinz World would always be just at the edge of your vision. He said that he had walked into it for approximately twenty days once, a desperate act to find any way out, defying the pointlessness of the action that he already knew well. He made it back to town in a couple hours.

(After Angel's disappearance, Furry and Sam had briefly freaked out, briefly discussed their options, and quickly decided that they had to see this – that it was the most hope they had ever had of finding an escape.)

They walked for five minutes, and that was all it took before the green below them shifted to black, the sky above them shifted to blacker, and a simple wooden desk appeared before them.

At the side of the desk was Angel, standing on the ground and facing them.

And sitting behind it was Ms. Birdy.

"Welcome!" she earnestly greeted once they had walked up. "Thank you both very much for coming!"

Sam ignored the welcome, immediately targeting Angel. "So what the hell are you doing here?"

"I know this is confusing, and you don't trust me," she empathetically said. "But please, Birdy will explain everything. I hope you will understand my choices afterwards."

Sam grunted discontentedly, but turned towards the figure sitting at the desk regardless. "Well?" he growled.

"Where should we begin?" the humanoid duck pondered cheerily. "I'm sure you want to hear about the nature of this world you're in, yes?"

"That sounds like a good place to start," Furry responded unsurely, still a little overwhelmed by the sensation that he was standing on nothing and should have been falling at any given moment.

"Then let's begin! The first thing to understand is that there is another plane of reality to ours, the Material Universe, though you could call it whatever you like. That world is just full of living beings, much like us, whose minds mix material molecules and mysterious mechanisms." In the middle of her explanation, Ms. Birdy giggled. "Your language is just so interesting to use," she said as an aside, shaking her head amusedly.

"That's wonderful to hear. Get to the fucking point," Sam demanded with annoyance, presumably just as befuddled as Furry but putting it aside for the moment.

"Yes, of course. Well, the unusual quantum mechanisms responsible for our consciousness, processes that most of us living things never understood, vibrate in quite unusual ways. As a byproduct, it turns out these vibrations make a sort of imprint on a higher dimension, a constant record of the mind. You humans might call it a 'soul', but on its own, it's really only information. Without the natural particle processes that keep it running, there is no consciousness, no active mind. But fortunately for this unfortunate state of affairs, there's hope for these inert souls! For our reality, the Thought Plane – or at least that's what I call it – is sensitive to change, and influenced by a great many factors, amplified by chaos theory and circulating all throughout it. And sometimes, just very rarely, these currents of activity will happen to spark a soul in just the right way to restore its function, its very life! Well, because the Thought Plane is influenced at a particulate level by the processes of minds, a soul once restarted will sustain itself through self-feedback – so long as its progenitor being is dead and so does not overwrite it. But there is more to this than just restored life. As the Thought Plane responds to the processes of minds, any mind, once restarted, is able to control our world, one particle at a time. And so, there are beings like me – or even the three of you! – who can manipulate our reality, and are in a sense gods. Though of course, it is quite difficult to alter even one particle exactly as you wish to, and most meaningful effects require manipulating vast amounts of them, and so most gods take many, many years to establish any real degree of control."

Suddenly, she leaned towards Furry and Sam, and with a disconcerting, frankly incongruous grin, she boasted, "But not me!"

She sounded proud as she continued explaining. "No, my soul was only restarted a mere twenty-three human years ago. Normally, I could never dream of standing against the older gods in the fierce competition for gathering souls to my own world with such little experience controlling the Thought Plane. But I spent my time experimenting, devising a new technique. Our world, of course, is manipulated by the thoughts of minds – and where else can one find such a large number of active minds than the material universe? So, I managed to create an innovative process of linking our world to thought processes in the material world, and thereby offloading the work of controlling the Thought Plane to a much larger population. To make any sort of cohesive world, however, I needed to connect to the thoughts surrounding a single idea. Living humans have something called computer games – I believe you both may remember what they are?" (Furry found that he did, in the same inexplicable way he knew so many other things about a world he had never lived in (or apparently had lived in?)) "Well, they are quite applicable for this purpose – a medium that causes large quantities of minds to focus on an already well-defined and consistent world. I found a game called 'Webkinz' that I felt described a world I wanted to create.

"And so, Webkinz World was born in the Thought Plane, powered by thousands of minds collectively doing the hard work to construct it, giving it enough of a solid existence to resist other gods, and allowing me to collect a fair number of the human souls that so interested and appealed to me and place them into a world of my own. That, friends, is why we are here, and why this world exists. I hope you are enjoying it!"

Furry gave himself time in silence to work through the explanation – in fact, the whole gathering was silent for a while. The descriptions of quantum particles and higher dimensions were all a bit of a mystery to Furry. He did recognize some of the ideas, but deeper understanding eluded him. If this new knowledge was true, then he supposed he must not have been an expert in the field during his previous life. But if he simply accepted the fact that thoughts controlled the Thought Plane, then everything basically made sense… not that he didn't have his questions.

He began with a lesser one. "You said that we were humans? Not Webkinz?"

"Why, yes! In fact, 'Webkinz' do not even exist as living things in the material universe, outside of humans' imaginations – and their computer game, of course."

"And… are you not human?" he followed up, expressing an impression he had felt from the way Ms. Birdy spoke.

"No. I come from an alien species of a different planet. Humans, however… you are so similar to us, but so different, too. You're quite exciting – I couldn't resist bringing your souls into my world! As for my own species, I couldn't pronounce its name, nor my own real name, in English. We do not really speak in the same way that you do. But you may both call me Ms. Birdy!"

"So here's what I still don't get," Sam interjected, disgruntled. "Why the fucking hunger?"

Ms. Birdy's pride mellowed out. "Ah," she sighed. "As it turns out, there were a number of issues with my method of creation. Because I have no influence on the thoughts of those in the material universe, the world they create is rigid. That firmness is good in the sense that it protects Webkinz World from other gods, but at the same time, it means that much of the world is out of my control. We are bound, essentially, to the human minds that think about Webkinz World, and to exactly what they expect of it. Part of the effect of this is that souls which are restarted by my world are not… completely restarted. There are processes enough in them to create consciousness, but your minds are too controlled by the structure humans impose upon them to really awaken to your normal selves. What you call Lucids, though, have somehow returned to full activity and broken from the dependency on human minds. I still do not quite understand why this happens, but I believe it is more up to chance than anything else.

"Oh, but I'm digressing from the question you asked! Well, the other effect of our reliance on humans is that nothing new can really be created without human interaction. The items that were in your Docks when your owners left are the only items you will ever have, unless you trade with other Webkinz. Unfortunately, this includes food. I would of course like to simply disable your hunger, but it is too deeply grounded in the rules of our world. Your bodies have real, biological mechanisms inside of them that are reliant on food – and if I knew how to interfere meaningfully with those, I wouldn't need a connection to the material world. So, the hunger is just something we will unfortunately have to bear. We are working on a solution, but it is likely to be hundreds or thousands of years before that is achievable."

"I don't think I understand. Why can't you just make more food? You… do seem to have some control here, don't you?" Furry puzzled.

"Well, it's more a matter of complexity. If I simply needed to create a solid block of… iron, let's say, it would be quite easy." She closed her eyes in concentration for a few moments, and surely enough, a small iron cube simply formed on her desk, building itself quickly up from the bottom. She picked it up and began fidgeting with it as she continued.

"The problem is that food is not just many atoms of a single element put together in a regular shape. Just about anything that would allow your bodies to function would require a number of complicated macromolecules, repeated in varying formations all throughout the food. Making that is not a task for a twenty-three year old god," Ms. Birdy concluded, shaking her head.

"Then if you can't fix the problem, why the hell don't you just get rid of this world? Turn off the souls of those who aren't Lucid, get rid of the bodies of those who are. The hunger makes our lives a hell - there's no reason to keep us like this!" Up until now, Sam was annoyed, dissatisfied with Ms. Birdy, but it seemed like he had been... hearing her out, listening to her reasoning before passing a judgement. Now, he had heard her, and he sounded angry. Furry found himself nodding along to the request.

Ms. Birdy, on the other hand, sounded disturbed - hurt, even. "I don't understand all of you humans. When you first heard my explanation, you asked for that, Angel asked for that, Emerald asked for that, Leo asked for that - Why? Why would you all want something like that? Existing in the fullest form possible, having an active mind and a physical body - isn't that the most important thing? I can't even imagine wanting to give that up."

"Well clearly, we don't want the same fucking thing as you. You can go ahead and keep existing 'fully' if you want, but get the rest of us out of these damn bodies!" Sam's rage was only growing more intense as she continued her explanation.

"I refuse!" She returned with anguish. "If that is what you want, then I don't trust your judgement! Returning you all back to a fraction of a being - it's too horrible to consider!"

(Furry, like Sam, was starting to feel something too. He wanted to give Ms. Birdy a chance - to find out that she had a good reason for putting them all through this - but... Sam's suffering, Lucky's fate, the hunger of all the thousands of Webkinz who had never woken up - all of that, because Ms. Birdy just didn't understand what they wanted? Because she refused to let it stop, no matter how easy it would be?

It was a new feeling that was rising, something he had only had hints of before. It was something burning in his chest, the fire almost painful but making him want to keep it flaming anyway. Was this anger?)

"Great," San barked. "Great! So it turns out the reason we're all facing eternal pain is because our god has a fucking idiotic set of priorities! I'm glad we've been so enlightened!"

Sam turned to the side with exasperation, took a few heavy breaths, and finally snapped his gaze towards Angel.

"So where the hell do you fit into all this? I'm still not a damn step closer to 'understanding your actions'."

"Eight years ago, Birdy approached me with an offer. Since all active souls are able to manipulate the Thought Plane, Lucids can, too. I made it through the hunger without becoming catatonic, and so she requested that I join her and assist in controlling and improving Webkinz World. I couldn't refuse - this was my best chance to make a difference in the situation of all Webkinz." Throughout the whole explanation, she kept up an apologetic tone, but she was still composed, still firm.

"Right," Sam responded, still sounding skeptical, but perhaps less so than before. "And why, then, did you lie to Furry?"

Angel glanced up at Ms. Birdy, as if asking for permission.

The humanoid duck, in response, took up her explanation from there. "Sam displays and has always displayed a hatred of my system too strong to trust him. I cannot involve him in administrating it, for fear that he would try to destroy it. I instructed Angel to try and drive Sam away from Furry, to keep him out of things. Well, after Sam became suspicious of Angel too, I decided to explain things to him as well - I have always felt it is better to try and talk things through with potential opposition. But now I have explained things, and I must talk with Furry alone, so I will send you off, Sam. Have a good day!"

Before he could protest, Sam instantly disappeared.

When Furry looked concernedly at Ms. Birdy, she assured, "Oh, no worries. I have only sent him back to town. But I do have something of importance to talk to you about. Furry, with your stock of food, you can be expected to remain active for years to come. I would like to offer you the same thing I have to Angel. I wish for you to join me here. I will help you learn to control the Thought Plane, and you will help me with Webkinz World.

"However, as I have stated, Sam is a danger to my work. If you join me, you will have to leave him behind. I will let you think, but I would be delighted if you choose to work together with me!"

And so, as Ms. Birdy and Angel watched, Furry thought.

Of course the benefits were obvious. He could contribute to the cause - help save everyone from the hunger faster, even just a little bit.

Of course the costs were obvious, too.

Minutes of back and forth in Furry's mind passed. Ultimately, though, he had to come to a conclusion.

At last, hesitantly and with a shaky voice, he answered.

"I accept."


	7. Sowing

Ms. Birdy had responded ecstatically to Furry’s decision, welcoming him to the team and explaining that he would live in this external void region to the world while he worked, as Angel did. She said she would give him some time to “settle in” before she began teaching him about how to mentally control their reality.

                It was only after he began to look around, on his own and out of sight of the other two, that the message came.

                It was written in slightly bright white light, floating in front of his eyes, the edge effects and flatness revealing that it seemed to exist only within his vision, that it was not an object that had appeared in front of him.

                [DON’T SHOW ANY SIGN THAT YOU SEE THIS!] was all it showed at first, large font taking up much of his vision. Furry tried to do as told.

Afterwards, it changed to be longer, and smaller, but still readable. [This is Angel. I am making what I believe to be a reasonable assumption that you wish to work against Ms. Birdy in order to shut down Webkinz World. She will be able to see or hear any mundane communications through her powers over the Thought Plane. In order for us to cooperate, we will need to send messages at a higher level, through direct manipulation of reality, as I am doing now. You should begin to learn how to mimic this method after Birdy teaches you how to do basic manipulation. It will take you time, likely around two weeks, but it is on the simpler side of things. The essence of it is to create photons that are directed towards the recipient’s eyes and will not spill over to anywhere else. In the meantime, if you would like me to send a message to Sam explaining your disappearance and asking him to learn this same method, please tap your front left paw on the ground three times – and try to make it subtle.] Furry did so, and a few seconds later the text changed. [Signal received. I will send the message.]

Furry’s vision went quiet for a little while, so he returned focus to actually exploring the room he had been given. The walls and roof looked to be a metallic grey – he presumed they were created out of pure iron (or some other metal) by Birdy or Angel. The bed and table, on the other hand, looked like proper furniture that would have been back in his house in the main part of Webkinz World. He supposed it was possible that they were created by thought manipulation, but they seemed rather complex for that, so he wondered if they were simply retrieved from someone’s item dock.

While he walked, his mind was racing. He _had_ intended to turn against Ms. Birdy, Angel was spot on – that was the main reason he had accepted in the first place. (But then he had to wonder if that was really Angel – nothing about it truly proved she was the sender. Perhaps Ms. Birdy was testing his loyalty? To see if he would report this message? He didn’t see much of a way to figure out which was which without risking revealing Angel, if it really was her. He could only place his hope in the fact that this _really_ didn’t seem like something Ms. Birdy would do. She had sounded so… bright.)

[I have told Sam of the circumstances.] came a few minutes later. [We can continue working on this after you begin with Ms. Birdy. She will likely come retrieve you soon. In the meantime, just follow along with everything, and act like this never happened.]

* * *

 

                “It’s so exciting to be teaching a new student again!” exulted Ms. Birdy. She had shifted from the desk setup before, and instead was sitting on a chair by itself, facing Furry and Angel on the floor. (This chair looked a bit fancier than the desk, though it was still wooden – though Furry thought both were items from Webkinz World anyway.)

                “Well, let’s get started! The basic trick to manipulating the Thought Plane is to focus on the effect you want to produce. Though, it sounds quite a lot simpler than it actually is! To begin with, you have to imagine every effect from the bottom up – you have to think of _exactly_ how each individual particle contributes to things. And beyond that, it isn’t sufficient to merely visualize the intended outcome – the Thought Plane isn’t exactly optimized for regular human thought to control it. There is simply no good way to describe the proper way to do things in human words. If only you were of my race… but never mind that. It will take you a fair bit of time and practice, but if you mentally ‘feel around’ for how to do things, you should eventually figure it out. I would suggest trying to produce photons first. They’re just about the simplest things to deal with!”

So Furry began trying. After the first few minutes came to no result – as everyone had expected – Ms. Birdy and Angel began working on their own projects, leaving Furry mostly on his own to concentrate.

(He didn’t concentrate very well. He was thinking of Sam, first, of what he would be thinking at the moment, and of how long it would be before they actually saw each other again – or even just managed to communicate. He was thinking of Ms. Birdy, of the discordance between how she acted and what she was _doing_ , her role in the world – and of what would need to be done to stop her. (Planning to betray someone, to _attack_ them in some manner, continued to feel _wrong_ , a tearing hook on his conscience that he had to _force_ himself to pull against anyway, because things _could not go on_.) He was thinking of Emerald and Leo, the two names mentioned only in passing who he was left wondering about. And he was thinking of Angel, who… was not, in almost any way, who she had seemed to be.

He didn’t accomplish very much that day.)

 

* * *

                “How did things go?” Angel asked when she and Ms. Birdy walked back towards Furry a few hours later.

                “Well, um, I wasn’t quite able to make anything happen,” the wolf sheepishly admitted.

                “Oh, no worries!” assured Ms. Birdy. “That’s only normal for your first day. We’ll give you some time to rest before you start again. In the meantime, how about deciding on living arrangements? I know Emerald and Leo wanted to be left alone, but would you two like to stay together?”

                “That sounds agreeable to me,” responded Angel, with a just slightly noticeable touch of haste, taking the lead before Furry could. He had intended to accept, too, but he supposed this was more of Angel guiding her plan along.

                “I’d also be happy to stay with Angel,” Furry agreed, with an enthusiasm that was a little less genuine than usual.

                “Then it’s settled,” Ms. Birdy concluded, putting her hands together decisively. “Angel, would you show Furry to your house?”

 

* * *

                In the main part of Webkinz World, Furry was _aware_ that space was being distorted – he knew about the different instances of the world that somehow blended together – but it was mostly invisible. There, the most apparent irregularity was the inside of the house, which became a completely different place for each Webkin, often too big to have fit inside the external building.

                Here, however, the spatial folds were an omnipresent part of life. Generally, Furry could only see dark void around him – a sensation he was still adjusting to – but when one of the two more experienced Webkinz wanted to take him somewhere, he suddenly found it appearing before him, breaking the monochromatic background. The same was true of his transit to Angel’s home, which popped into existence as a large, rectangular block of metal that – for once – was actually the right size for its contents.

                The inside was much like any Webkin’s house that he had previously seen, besides being a lot more bare, and the walls being nothing but grey metal. The furniture – a few tables and chairs together here and there, a couple bookshelves, a game of Legal and Non-Copyright-Infringing “Link’D” (which Furry was sure had no relation to a game he had free-floating past-life knowledge of, Connect Four), and two beds in separate rooms – was so basic and so disjointed in theme that Furry had to assume it was just whatever Angel happened to have remaining in her dock when she was left behind.

                “This is your room, here,” she presented, gesturing with a paw in the open doorway. “I would expect that you’ll mainly use it for sleeping when you need it, though you’re welcome to go there anytime. That’s about it for showing you around – this building is relatively simplistic. But make yourself at home, and have a rest.”

                Furry nodded. “Thank you for letting me live with you,” he said. He at least _tried_ to sound cheery.

                He looked around the rooms before eventually walking over to the Link’D setup. He ignored the chairs – they had always been uncomfortable since he became Lucid, and he wondered why they weren’t before – and sat on the floor by the low table, as did Angel when she walked over to join him.

                “These games are interesting,” the ice fawn began musingly. “The two player mode is nothing unusual – we simply place the chips in as usual, and the apparatus works as a regular physical object. But if you sit by the table on your own, and place only your chips, the other chips will levitate into position and fall on their own. They are not random either – they are actually placed with a fair degree of intelligence.” She placed her first piece as she spoke, and Furry responded in turn.

                “Birdy tells me the original computer game this world is based on has a decision-making algorithm for this game built into its code.” She shook her head slowly. “The idea of such a thing is somewhat familiar to me, but I admit I have very little idea how it would work. I suppose it was not my area of expertise before I died. Still, it is interesting to note that it carried over to the Thought Plane.”

                Furry let the topic hang for a couple moves. (He wasn’t _awful_ at the game, but he hadn’t played much of it, whereas Angel appeared to be quite experienced. Regardless of whatever his level of skill was, he was fully expecting to lose, as he had the few times he played with Sam. He didn’t particularly mind.) Unlike Angel, Furry _did_ feel like he had some idea about the… artificial intelligence behind the game, he remembered that was what it was called. It would consider all the possible moves a few turns ahead, assign a score to features of each outcome, choose the move with the highest score, repeat…

                “How do you feel about this… past life thing?” Furry inquired.

                “How do _you_ feel about it?” returned Angel.

                He had to think about it for a minute. “I can’t remember much of anything about what actually happened in it, so I’m not really sure what to think. I guess I would have left people I cared about behind, which I wouldn’t want to do, but I… don’t know anything, about any of them. Am I supposed to miss them? It feels like I should – I normally always _would_ – but what’s there to miss?”

                “For me,” Angel answered after a pause, “I do, in fact, feel quite close to a memory. I am sure I had family members: a husband, two children, a brother – my parents were both dead already, I believe – though my memory of all of them is fuzzy, lacking specifics. But I don’t find myself thinking about them very often. I believe they once mattered greatly to me, but that was that life, and it is over now. I have to look to what’s ahead of me now, and focus on fixing the world that I am _currently_ in. I don’t think it’s wrong for you not to miss the people in your former life. It would only be wrong not to care about the people you know _now_.”

                For a little while, only the clacking of game pieces sliding into place was heard. Then, white light filled half of Furry’s vision.

                [I know being here, and leaving Sam behind, is hard for you. I can certainly sympathize with that. But if you ever doubt yourself, trust me that you have done a very honorable thing by accepting Birdy’s offer. We _are_ going to manage our goal, and then Sam, and Lucky, and everyone else will be okay again. I believe you will be able to do it, and I thank you sincerely for trying.]

                (Angel finished her row of four pieces. Furry had never really had a doubt that she would.)

 

* * *

                It took four days before Furry was able to create his first photon. He only knew it had happened because Ms. Birdy had sensed it and let him know, or it would have disappeared without notice. The next nine days were spent juggling learning simultaneous creation of many particles and directing them in a specific manner.

                And so, when Furry and Angel were in their house on the thirteenth day since he came to work with Ms. Birdy, he was able to create a brief message into Angel’s eyes only, off-center in her vision and with fuzzy-edged, blocky capital letters, but readable regardless:

                [FIRST]

* * *

 

                A few days of refining the technique later, Furry could manage the quick creation of larger messages. Angel informed him on this day that Sam had accomplished his first message.

                (Communications involving Sam were going to be a little complicated. In order to make the messaging system work, one had to know where the recipient’s eyes were going to be. When Angel and Furry were in the same room, this worked out fine, but looking back to a house in town from their current location would require reality manipulation of its own. Angel could do it; the others couldn’t. For now, Furry would be relaying messages through her. The opposite direction was even _more_ of a hassle, because Sam didn’t have anyone within vision to communicate through. Instead, Angel had to designate a specific region on Sam’s wall to treat as her eyes, and then inform him when she was watching it. She _was_ instructing them on teleporting photons into their eyes to be able to see far away, but for now this mess would have to do.)

                [F to S – Hello.] (With three people involved, they had had to organize a system of designating senders, and for messages going through Angel, recipients, too.)

                [S to F – HEY. HOW’S IT GOING?]

                [F to S – I’m okay. It’s all kind of weird out here, and it’s a stressful goal, and I don’t think the constant darkness helps things, but at least I can talk to you again now, and Angel hasn’t been so bad now that I understand her better.]

                [S to F – I DON’T ACTUALLY HAVE ANY PROOF THAT I’M TALKING DIRECTLY TO YOU AND ANGEL ISN’T MAKING EVERYTHING UP, YOU KNOW. SO I GUESS I JUST HAVE TO ASSUME THE WORST. IN WHICH CASE, WOW ANGEL, THAT’S PRETTY DAMN NARCISSISTIC.]

                [A to Both – I would like to say that I resent the direction of your conversation, but admittedly my past actions haven’t exactly inspired trust. However, I have to ask if this is going to be an ongoing problem.]

                The delay for the next message was a bit longer than usual. [S to Both – NO, I GUESS NOT. NOT LIKE THERE’S MUCH OF ANY REASON FOR YOU TO DO WHAT YOU DID BESIDES THE WHOLE BIRDY THING.]

                [A to Both – In that case, I believe it’s time to begin discussing the reason we are gathered.

                Our fundamental goal is to break Birdy’s control over Webkinz World. I have considered the possibilities, but it does seem that the only way to do this properly would be to deactivate her soul. As long as she continues thinking, she will be able to manipulate reality.

                Doing this, however, will not be simple. Minds in the Thought Plane have a self-reinforcing effect, as their thoughts naturally change reality to make their minds continue to exist and function – this is the same effect that lets Lucid souls remain active in the first place. This is not to mention that Birdy has learned a method of amplifying this effect – a subconscious process of manipulation that constantly supports the operation of her mind. She has taught me this same process and told me everything about how it works, which will help us disable it – she is _very_ trusting. Her species simply does not _have_ betrayal or deception practically ever – the way their civilization works, it would essentially never be a useful strategy. The fact that she ever distrusted Sam enough to exclude him was surprising even to me, and even that only occurred due to how openly brash he is. (Part 1 of 2)]

                [S to Both – HEY]

                A few seconds passed. [S to Both – I MEAN YOU’RE NOT WRONG]

                [A to Both – Putting that aside for a moment. The last complication to shutting Birdy down is the greatest one. What gives Birdy her great resistance to the other gods is the rigidity of Webkinz World, rooted in crowdsourcing from the material universe. As she inhabits a body that is part of this mass imagination, her mind is rigid too. Disabling it is certain to be futile unless we can interrupt the connection to the living world.

                Therefore, our plan of attack will involve severing the connection, and then attempting as a group to freeze enough of the particles that make up Birdy’s consciousness to turn it off entirely. In the coming months, we will need to prepare and practice these two operations. It will be best to act before Furry runs out of food so that our numbers will be maximized. (Part 2 of 2)]

(Furry was down to 670 Almonds.)

 

* * *

                [F to A – Angel, I’ve been wondering, what _was_ going on with Ms. Birdy considering bringing us here? What was it like?] (It was a couple days later, when Furry and Angel were on a break in the house, not currently engaged in much of anything.)

                [A to F – When you woke up, Birdy was torn about how to handle you. It is usually her policy to invite any Lucid who manages the hunger, but you were unusual, because you hadn’t actually run out of food yet. She knew that if she started teaching you, that effort would likely eventually go to waste when you really did fall to the hunger. She was wavering between the options, but despite my advice in favor of making the offer to you, I perceived that she was tending towards not bringing you here, especially after you met with Sam. For my purposes, of course I wished for both of you to join me, but I could not risk openly defying Birdy to tell you the truth. So, when she sent me to separate you from Sam, I took the opportunity to let slip hints – enough to make you suspicious of me, but also plausible to have been true sloppiness. After you confronted me, of course, she was much more willing to talk to you, and beyond my expectations, she even invited Sam. Of course, you know the rest.]

                (Furry was at 667 Almonds now.)

 

* * *

                Five more weeks passed. Sam and Furry had been working on establishing basic control, and had both finally managed the photon-teleportation trick well enough to speak without Angel as an intermediary. At the same time, Furry had been probing at the connection between worlds a little bit, gaining a rudimentary feel of how it worked.

                (Between Angel’s information and his own investigation, Furry understood the connection to be like this: Human thoughts about Webkinz naturally made slight impressions on the Thought Plane that were sort of like partial creations of the imagined world. However, as Birdy had said, the Thought Plane was not optimized for human thought, and so these impressions generally were quite incomplete and only occasionally functional. Still, each human mind created a recognizable Webkinz-based imprint on the Thought Plane in a defined, constant location. What Birdy had done was find and fold together each of these regions through exotic higher-dimension geometries, overlaying the many fragments of imagination to form a coherent world. The plan was to undo this unification – to separate the overlapping space and thereby eliminate the inflexible structure the imprints imposed. Working out the _execution_ of the plan was the real challenge.)

                For now, though, Sam and Furry were making use of their improved messaging skills to simply talk with each other. (The necessary viewing of the message’s recipient meant that each of them could actually _see_ the other – the conversation was almost face-to-face. It felt like things were nearly back to normal again for Furry – as normal as they had ever been in this life, anyway.)

                [S to F –] (They kept up the identifying convention even in a conversation like this, partly out of habit, and partly in case the third co-conspirator interrupted unexpectedly.) [It’s kinda surreal to think we could actually put a stop to the hunger soon. I mean, who the hell am I gonna be angry at when we’ve overcome Birdy? How the hell am I gonna keep being an irritable dick all the time when I’m not in constant pain anymore?]

                [F to S – You aren’t really a d*** anyway, Sam!]

                A longer pause. [F to S – Most of the time. I think.]

                Another gap. [F to S – I guess irritable is fair, though.]

                Then, a much longer pause, as Furry prepared a longer message, and hesitated sending it. [F to S – Can I be honest? I still really don’t like this plan. We’re going to turn against someone who trusts us, and shut off her soul, and… it doesn’t feel right. I want to be nice to everyone – we’re _supposed_ to be nice to everyone. Are we really good people for doing this?]

                Furry could see the contortion of Sam’s face through the visual link. [S to F – I get that you feel that way. But sometimes we’ve gotta do things we don’t like, ‘cause the alternative just _can’t_ go on. It just takes one look at Webkinz World to know it’s sure as hell better than leaving her in charge.]

                [F to S – I guess.]

                (Furry had 625 Almonds now.)

* * *

 

 

                Eight more months passed. Furry had now spent 87% of this existence in the void, and it had started to feel like this was more the normal part of his life than an unusual digression.

Furry had learned to create basic, single-element structures, and a much larger variety of fundamental particles. In theory, Sam could do the same, but he couldn’t try it on a much greater scale than a few of any given particle for fear that Ms. Birdy would notice another manipulator. Furry had also worked out the trick of moving through the strangely folded space out here in the void, which definitely helped him get about freely.

                Still, these functions were on the less important side of things anyway. In terms of the real work, Furry had been mainly learning about how to disrupt the connection. (They had found that Furry’s greater knowledge of computer code made him uniquely suited for this task: he understood the structure that still pervaded Webkinz World in the Thought Plane, and thanks to this, he understood better how to tear it apart.) He was making progress, he thought, but it would be unfortunately impossible to test this part of the plan in full before the actual execution – even relatively small disturbances of the entire spacetime structure they resided in were still pretty noticeable.

                Sam, since he couldn’t safely work on anything that wasn’t subtle, decided to focus on the part of the plan that _was_ subtle – freezing the motion of particles in Ms. Birdy’s mind. He was only trying it on inanimate objects, but there wasn’t much real difference at the fundamental level between this and what he would really be doing when it came time.

                Angel was already more skilled than either of them at most parts of the plan, but she continued practicing on her own, and spent a fair portion of time assisting the other two with their respective study.

                Currently, though, she wasn’t practicing anything – only discussing.

                [A to Both – I’ve been trying to think, recently, about what will come after our coup. It is easy for me to become lost in the urgency of the issues already facing Webkinz World, but once we have completed our task, I expect our difficulties will only be beginning.]

                [F to Both – What do you mean?]

                [A to Both – Humans, in our current form, have existed for a few hundred thousand years. There are many, many more alien species present in the Thought Plane, and most of them have been around quite significantly longer than us. This means that the vast majority of powerful gods are _not_ human. From what Birdy has told me, she is on the closer side to sharing human values, and even so, the small differences have consigned us to the hunger. Most of the other gods will not be good for our souls, and many may be even worse than what we face now. I have even heard of a god who claims to have managed permanent oblivion of souls.] (This was a surprise to Furry. From what he understood, it was not terribly difficult to take apart a mind so it would not function. The difficult part was to take it apart in such a way that it would not be easy to see how it was separated and reassemble it. (It was a bit disingenuous to call it “easy”. Apparently, even experienced gods could take months to years to put together a highly obscured fractured soul, and even lesser destructions were never _easy_ to revert. They were merely achievable.))

[Once we have taken control of this world’s souls, what will we do with them then? It will likely not be as easy as merely taking them to another, more experienced god. I believe it would be highly advisable that we reconstruct at least some aspects of the connection to the living once we are done, or we will be defenseless against far stronger alien minds. Even then, there will be plenty of work left to create a truly good world for us all.]

Furry didn’t reply. He wasn’t terribly confident about the far future, but he wasn’t terribly confident about the _near_ future anyway. He would just have to keep moving forward, to stop the things that simply couldn’t go on.

(Furry had 352 Almonds now.)

* * *

 

                It wasn’t until nine and a half months later, at 28 Almonds and not long left to showtime, that Ms. Birdy screwed with everything.

                “I have great news!” she exulted at the beginning of their session. “I have not explained this fully to you, Furry, but the species I come from has an ability to _interface_ with each other, in a sense, merging our minds and bodies to create something greater than any of us working alone. It equilibrates each mind, bringing each closer to the character of the other, forming a single, changed being. Staying unified with many others is a large part of our way of life, but during my time in the Thought Plane, it has not been possible. But after much work, I believe I have developed a way to do so at last! By inserting two souls into the same Webkinz body, and making some more subtle tweaks to the minds, I should be able to create a similar merge. Which of you would want to try it out with me?” (There was a layer of intensity behind the revelation, an undercurrent of _longing_ that made it quite believable to Furry just how much the process played into her past life. It was somewhat unsettling.)

                A message showed up in Furry’s vision as Ms. Birdy’s explanation was still wrapping up, the letters blocky and fuzzy at the edges, the conventions ignored – it had obviously been constructed in the utmost of haste. [CANT BE ONE OF US SHELL LEARN PLAN BUT SOMEONE IN THERE COULD DISTRACT HER MAKE ATTACK EASIER WHO DO YOU KNOW]

                “Um,” Furry spoke up. “Actually… I know the hunger doesn’t really bother you, so if this merge would bring the other mind closer to you… I have a friend that I would like to do it instead.”

* * *

 

                The process took a few hours of delicate manipulations by Ms. Birdy alone. Lucky’s mind was removed from the sun lion body briefly and replaced into Ms. Birdy’s. (It was, in fact, Furry’s first time seeing a mind bare, despite all his time working with the Thought Plane. The shape of it resembled a brain, but it was an electric blue – _actually_ electric, he guessed – and was constantly shifting between different parts crackling into and out of view as it worked.)

                When it was done, she stood up, stumbling. Her gait was different now, less of a spring, less comfortable, more pained. “Oh. I can think straight again. And also I could always think straight.” Even her tone, her style of speaking, was noticeably different. “I’d forgotten what this was like. And also I never experienced it before. This is all very interesting. I suppose I still – _Birdy_ still feels like the main part of me, but then it doesn’t seem like it makes quite as much sense anymore to say there’s a ‘main’ part of me. I’ve certainly missed this! Usually not so much pain with it, though…”

* * *

 

                The next couple weeks were interesting, and as they were so close to the date of execution, this was very nerve-wracking for all involved. Ms. Birdy (Furry had settled on continuing to call her that, as she did seem to remain the dominating influence on the new hybrid) was adjusting to her new identity, integrating the two minds further into her one being. For one, the changes left her lost in thought more often, startled at an interruption – she had _always_ been alert before.

                For another, she was _remembering_ things.

                “I think I’m coming to an idea of what my – Lucky’s past life was like,” she had recollected once, partway into the second week. “I used to work for a space company; I was a rocket engineer, but… I believe I grew apart from my family for the sake of my work. I didn’t have time for both, and so I left them behind… and as I got older, and my mind started to decay, they were forced to take care of me regardless. I was only ever a burden for them…” Ms. Birdy shook her head. “But I guess that’s only one part of me now, and it’s over and done with anyway. At least I finally figured it out, somewhat. I still don’t remember much of anything about them, though…”

                But last of all, she was… less sure of her convictions about the priority of “complete” existence. She had waffled between the two choices a number of times, admitting her better understanding of the human perspective now, but still showing instinctual revulsion at the idea of turning off the souls and bodies of Webkinz.

                [F to Both – Ms. Birdy really seems close to changing her mind on freeing us from our bodies. Maybe we don’t need to attack her after all? We may be able to convince her.]

                [A to Both – We can try. It would certainly be easier, but if she doesn’t decide by the time you reach the Almond threshold, I think we will have to enact our plan regardless. You are the only one of us who will likely be able to sever the connection between realities – we can’t risk losing you.]

                And so they tried. Furry and Angel argued in support of shutting down Webkinz World – not too aggressively, very much trying to avoid suspicion, but consistently at the times when Ms. Birdy seemed most conflicted. Furry felt that perhaps they might have managed it with more time.

But Furry had hit 10 Almonds now, and they had agreed long ago they would risk no lower.


	8. Cease and Desist

Furry and Angel had tried to choose the least conspicuous part of the day to begin the plans, as they sat around in their house. Furry was nervously reaching out with his mind towards the structure of Webkinz World. Angel was keeping watch over Ms. Birdy, and preparing to contact Emerald and Leo the moment the duck became aware of their actions. Sam was ready to teleport himself to their location at the same time. There was no time left to reconsider things.

                Now, it was simply up to Furry to begin.

The procedure began as it had in the early-stage practice he was limited to. The world was divided into particles, the particles were separated by progenitor mind, the particles of each mind had a different quality, the different qualities could be grasped, a hook in each; and he did.

Then came tearing them apart, untangling the mess of overlapping templates and pushing each one further apart, into a sort of sphere of imprints (though the sphere’s physical geometry was confusing even to Furry; headache-inducing to think about even as he began forming it). It would have been moderately easier to completely release the folds in spacetime that kept them together, but doing so would also make it far harder to reconstruct them. The three of them had decided the added security when everything was done was worth the extra difficulty of execution.

Try as he might, it was obvious to Furry that he wouldn’t be able to pull apart _every_ imprint at once – there were over 300,000 impressions of meaningful contribution, and though he could group a lot of them together into similar clusters that he would move as one, this still left him with around 1,400 individual points to move. The most he could really handle at once was 60, and moving one group took him about 50 seconds.

Still, all he could do was begin to work, one by one, and hope he could manage it. So with a quick message to his two friends, he began to manipulate reality.

…and nothing interesting happened. Though he internally sighed in relief when he managed to completely dislocate the first set of clusters, he found that the world around him remained, at least visually, exactly as it was before. This much was expected – if Webkinz World couldn’t tolerate losing a small fraction of its thought-base, then how could it have even begun to exist so long ago, when many fewer people were thinking about it? But the more Furry moved apart the world around him, the more surprised he became at how nothing really seemed to change. He worked through 100 clusters, and then 300, and then 1,000, and there was _still_ practically no change. Furry began to grow concerned if he was really doing anything. Was Webkinz World really this stable?

And then, finally, when only three clusters were left, things degraded quite sharply. Even the naked eye could see what almost seemed to be a decrease in the resolution of the world around them – the particles that he was removing were spread essentially evenly throughout everything, so there weren’t any obvious _pieces_ missing, but something seemed very much _off_. Things _felt_ off too, Furry’s body lighting up with a stinging pain _everywhere_ , and his physical movements seeming less responsive.

As it happened, this was also the point when everything went to hell. Furry just tried not to focus on it yet.

Ms. Birdy appeared in front of them suddenly, along with a green earth puppy and another sun lion. The next instant, Sam was beside Angel, both of them standing in front of Furry – not that their physical position would matter much, Furry thought.

“What’s going on?” Ms. Birdy demanded hastily, harsher than she ever used to be – harsher than Furry thought she _could_ be (at least before the recent mind meld, which changed her in more ways than he understood) – and her voice sounding hoarse, damaged by the broken connection between universes.

“Furry was just practicing how to improve the connection,” Angel answered, at a much more leisurely pace. “So he wanted to try disassembling-”

“No. That isn’t what’s happening here. Cease this!” the duck barked. (Before giving him any time to comply, Furry’s vision lit up with a kaleidoscopic array of multicolored, extremely bright lights. He couldn’t concentrate with it there, surely Ms. Birdy’s intended effect, so he closed his eyes. The next moment, he no longer _had_ eyelids. (The pain of their removal blended in with everything else.) He made a new covering instead, a long iron drape that covered and rested on his head to stay on him. For now, that stopped the lights.)

Still the turmoil proceeded. Furry heard a new male voice, from the direction of where the sun lion had stood, tinged with some surprise. “You see that text too?” There was a silence, perhaps filled by a nod, and then the same voice continued. “We may not get a chance like this again. We have to do this.”

“Hey – Leo, get back here! Think about what you’re doing!” This was a female voice, probably the other newcomer (and probably Emerald).

“As she said!” cried Ms. Birdy. “You have to… help me… fight them?” She trailed off questioningly, uncertainly. Behind the metal veil, Furry couldn’t tell if it was Lucky’s influence, or if something else was going on.

“I can’t. I’m not letting this chance go,” Leo maintained – and his voice was next to _them_ now, moved from Ms. Birdy’s side.

There was a surprisingly long pause for the previous pace of the moment, and then a final, troubled statement by Emerald. “Fine. I won’t fight against you. But… I can’t fight against Birdy either. I… well, do your best.”

Then Furry pulled the next set of imprints apart, the world became too incomplete to hold itself together, and everything but their minds became dust.

                This, of course, included their sensory organs. They had planned for this, too, training their ability to sense things about the world with only their control of the Thought Plane and output it directly into their minds. It still took Furry a few dozen seconds to adjust, however – a delay Ms. Birdy was too experienced to need.

                When he managed to feel out the world around him, he found nothing but six minds – seven, depending on how you counted it. In a vague cluster near him were himself and his three allies, too similar in this form to distinguish their identities with his untrained eye; across from them was what must have been Ms. Birdy; and in the distance, removed from it all, was Emerald, simply watching.

                All of them were crackling with the blue currents, shaped into five human brains and Ms. Birdy. She, in the center, showed up as one regular human brain, and _something_ else attached throughout it, filling the gaps and immersed in the structure, that seemed almost fluid. The whole mind’s blue light looked erratic, increasingly unstable.

He saw that one of the minds around him seemed to be slightly less bright with electrical activity – and another of them was almost stopped, and dimming by the second. There was nothing he could do to help them, though – that would have to be their own responsibility. All he could do was throw his perception into the mess of forces inside Ms. Birdy’s brain.

Furry chose a region that seemed less affected than the others, and started to _grab_ onto what was happening. He wanted to take hold of every particle, and apply a force _inwards_ , pulling all of them towards their own central location. It was a bit easier to control all these particles when the general instruction was the same – far more feasible than trying to individually determine and counteract the motion of each one.

He started to pull, and very shortly afterwards, he felt an oppressive pull on himself in return. A quick “glance” in his perception revealed that the nearly-stopped mind had become completely shut down, and Ms. Birdy must have moved on to him.

He tried to enact the defenses Angel had taught him – (sense the force, find the pattern (there had to be one, Ms. Birdy was far too young to control _that_ many particles without applying the same pattern to them all), apply an opposite pattern of your own) – but he hadn’t had much time to practice, and Ms. Birdy seemed skilled at adjusting her attack so as to render irrelevant his own manipulations, and even turn them against himself.

He could only keep pulling on the mind, remain focused on his goal.

(His thoughts were slowing, he could feel it, the sluggishness, the fatigue that began setting in.)

He had to keep pulling, keep attacking, keep going… keep going…

(His awareness was slipping now, his efforts frequently pausing and restarting as he lost focus.)

He couldn’t stop… because things… couldn’t… go… on…

(His attack was useless now, his mind too close to complete stillness. As it slowed, the world around him seemed to speed up, events happening faster as he watched at the reaches of his consciousness. Two of the minds were still fighting, but Ms. Birdy was too intact, her mind not nearly slow enough, and his side was only decreasing in numbers…

As his last threads of awareness departed, Furry was reminded of what it was like to live with succ so long ago, before his Awakening.)

 

 

                In a subjective instant, Furry’s mind returned almost immediately to full function. The three other minds around him were all back to normal, too. Emerald remained unaffected in the distance.

                And in front of him was a cloud of fragmented brain-parts, the torn-apart remains of Ms. Birdy and Lucky alike, suspended where they had been left by the destroyer.

                Light appeared in front of him, not moving towards any eyes now, but simply held in place for him to observe. [A to F – We’re done.]

                As they had agreed, it was now Furry’s task to pull together the imprints and re-form Webkinz World. So he did, not wanting to think about the scene he had woken up to – and, as always, thinking about it anyway. (Putting the world back together was the matter of less than a minute with how he had set things up – by far the greatest difficulty in _separating_ the pieces of the world was picking apart individual impressions to move separately.)

                When everything was realigned, they all found themselves already in their reconstructed bodies – all of them who still had minds to put in them, anyway. Ms. Birdy, in front of them, was an empty husk, immediately falling to the ground.

                “What happened?” Furry asked, the dread still taking hold in his mind. He should have been overjoyed – they had _done it_ , Webkinz would finally be free of the hunger, permanently. Some parts of him _were_. Not most.

                “The fight was going poorly for us,” Angel answered apologetically. “Birdy was more resistant than we had expected. She had made a token attempt to attack me at the beginning, but after you shut down, she started seriously working on me. I couldn’t risk that she would shut me down before we had finished her, and so I dissolved her mind. It was much easier than freezing it.”

                “Lucky – Lucky was in there, too. He… we’re not going to be able to put him back together for _thousands_ of years, are we?” Furry stated.

                “Likely not,” Angel admitted sadly. “But if there was even a small chance of failure if I did not do as I did, multiplied by hundreds of years more suffering by the hunger, then it was too great a risk.”

                Sam was staring down at the ground silently, but had an air of grudging acceptance.

                Furry, on the other hand, began to cry. “He – He was our friend,” he sobbed.

                Angel looked at him for a few moments, then turned her gaze away into the empty distance.

                “Yes,” she sighed. “He was.”


	9. Growing

[F to S – Are you really sure you want to do this?]

                [S to F – Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s dangerous and maybe we’ll just end up in another shitty world. But hell, I’ve been dealing with shitty worlds for both my whole lives. You’ll come save us eventually, yeah?]

(More freed from the binds of Webkinz World, everyone had been remembering their past lives more. Sam recalled more hunger even then, imposed by poverty rather than physics. He was young, as far as he could tell – teenaged. He was fairly confident that he had been shot to death, but was still working out the why of it.)

[F to S – _Very_ eventually. If I can manage it.]

[S to F – Still. Somebody’s gotta do it, and it may as well be me. At least we know I can deal with it.]

[F to S – I guess.]

[S to F – Hey, I mean, I’ll miss you. These couple years with you have been pretty good, you know. And it’s thanks to you that it’s just gotten so much better. Me too, a bit, I guess. Actually, you know what, it was probably mostly Angel. But whatever, that’s not the point. Point is, we’re gonna see each other again. Hell, it might not even take more than a few weeks if we’re lucky.]

(They had no bodies to show emotion with, no sadness apparent, no regretful tones of voice. They had separated the minds of the Lucid from their bodies soon after their victory, though not before broadcasting a mass message explaining the truth of the world and letting them know they could even leave Webkinz World if they wanted – though they recommended against it, given all the alien gods. Most of the liberated minds had stayed. A few, after some time working out how to move around in their new state, left the safety behind. Furry wished they hadn’t, but after seeing what Ms. Birdy did, he felt it was best if he let them choose.)

A new mind appeared near them. [A to Both – So, you’re ready?]

(Angel already knew a fair amount about her former life, but more was coming back. She remembered being wealthy, owning a business. She felt like she had donated much of her wealth, and founded a charity, though she wasn’t sure what for. She was fairly certain she had died of old age, or at least died while she was old.)

[S to Both – Yeah. I guess it’s time to go, then.]

There was a long period of hesitation. [S to Both – See you soon, Furry.]

[F to Both – See you soon. Both of you. Please stay safe.]

[S to Both – We’ll do our best. We’ll be back to let you know when we find a better world. You know, if one of those actually exists.]

A few seconds later, the two minds beside Furry disappeared, and he was left behind, alone once more.

 

 

                Furry was purely a mind now, as he watched the main town of Webkinz World from above.

                It had been a long time since he had been here. Those few weeks, early in his new life, were strange to think about. For almost all his time here, there was simply the void – and there would be void for long to come. He knew he couldn’t return to that fresh beginning, wasn’t sure that he would want to. Really, he couldn’t quite remember what it felt like to live here back then.

                Things had changed. He had changed.

                (The time before even that beginning was coming back for Furry, too. There was little to say of it. He was a computer programmer – he had figured that out already. He lived a fairly normal life, free of major hardship, with a few friends and not much social interaction, though he felt he had wanted more. He had died while still attending college. He felt like it was probably due to a disease. He had never really made much of an impact on anything or anyone – he had simply lived, and then he had simply died. Somehow, the memories didn’t seem to matter much to him.)

                Furry looked down at Webkinz World, for a few moments being still.

                He had thought about the world’s system. It was a brilliant idea, and it had worked… but he decided that it was never going to truly _work_. Ms. Birdy’s reign had proved that much. If they remained so dependent on the living, their souls would simply never be able to wake up fully, to live independently. This outsourcing of creation was a fundamentally flawed plan.

                So Furry would just have to do the heavy lifting on his own, to make a new world the right way. It would take a while – and that was an understatement. It would probably be a few thousand years before he could even create a basically functioning world, he knew. But he felt like he could live with that. And he knew he wouldn’t have to do it alone – there were already dozens of other Lucids, freed from the hunger now, ready to help. Perhaps he could talk with Emerald and Leo, to start with. If he got lucky and Sam and Angel’s search bore fruit, maybe he wouldn’t have to wait nearly that long, anyway.

                He thought of the other gods, of the uncountable number of souls forced into awful situations like the Webkinz had been, still out there. He had _been_ thinking of them ever since Ms. Birdy’s defeat, in the back of his mind. Eventually, he thought, enough time would pass that the current gap in experience between him and the others wouldn’t matter so much, relatively. When that day came, he would try his best to save all the souls of the Thought Plane. For now, though, he had the Webkinz, these few thousand souls safe from the outside world, and he would help them until he was powerful enough to help everyone.

                But in the meantime, he wouldn’t be like Ms. Birdy. He would let the unawakened souls sleep.

                And so at last, with great effort, Furry erased the town below him, taking the bodies of every last Webkinz with it, holding their minds safe in the center of a rigid shell.

(He took special care to preserve the site of the battle, and the two interlinked minds that still remained there, ripped apart.)

 

 

                 Years after their last visit, succ remembered an old pastime, and an old login. They pulled up the site from their past – somewhat surprised, as always, that it was _still_ there. They wondered, briefly, if it would ever go away.

                The game loaded, as succ watched with continued amusement, until the room they had created so long ago popped into view. Over there were the obstructively large chairs – up there was the balloon that somehow blocked walking past it, succ remembered with a laugh – down on the item dock were those 747 Almonds, they recalled purchasing with a bigger laugh –

                And there in the center was a grey wolf, looking almost at the screen but restricted by the grid, with four empty meters in the corner, showing his lack of energy, food, happiness, or care.

                Still a heart icon floated up from the wolf in the room, and its image at the side spoke.

                “I missed you! Welcome back!”


End file.
